


such unruly heads and hearts

by younglemonade



Series: within these walls [1]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alex danvers/maggie sawyer - Freeform, F/F, Friends to Lovers, Hogwarts AU, Minor Sanvers, SuperCorp, Supergay, also chp4 if you're here for sanvers, bit of a slow burn lads, if you want to skip the slow burn head to chapter 4, karlena, supercorp hogwarts au, the chemistry of these two honestly, they used to be in the main relationships tag but i moved them, ultimate hybrid of angst and fluff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-05
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-09-06 16:42:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 57,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8760949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/younglemonade/pseuds/younglemonade
Summary: Lena wonders if the universe does this to everyone. Just recklessly bowls them over with people and realisations that they can't ever really recover from.///The one with Lena (who's suffocating under the weight of the Luthor name and everything that comes with it), Kara (who just wants to make friends and cheer loudly for Alex at Quidditch matches, even when the quaffle isn't near her), and the years over which they gravitate together. Hogwarts AU.





	1. the first year

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, I was so desperate for a Hogwarts AU that I decided to write it myself. I know these tend to be a bit divisive when it comes to which house characters are sorted into, but I tried my best to keep it to what I felt was realistic. I hope you enjoy the fic, and let me know if I should keep going. As per usual, I don't mean to step on any toes. It's unbeta'd, so any mistakes are mine :/

Lena walks half the length of the train before she finds an empty carriage. She supposes she ought to look for other first years to sit with, but her last name hangs over her like a curse, and she’s long since become allergic to the whispers. The second that _Luthor_ is breathed into the air, all anyone can talk about is dark magic and betrayal, and Lena suffocates under the irreparable contamination of her brother.  
  
So when she finally comes across a vacant booth, she quickly slips inside, resigning herself to a few dull hours of alternating between staring blankly out the window and just as blankly at the pages of her textbooks. She gazes down at the small ball of sooty black fluff that is curled in her lap, far more content than Lena herself. A few weeks ago, her mother had gifted the kitten to her, on the condition he be called Cadmus, after the Muggle legend of the monster-slaying Greek hero. The implication in this requirement makes Lena vaguely sick, and she had shortened it to Caddy the minute her mother was out of sight.  
  
She’s got her eyes closed and is listening to the soft humming of Caddy’s purrs when a tentative knock startles her. A small blonde girl with bright blue eyes is smiling gently at her, carefully sliding the compartment door open.  
  
“Hi,” she grins, and Lena’s vocabulary seems to be unable to unearth a suitable reply. Years of etiquette training and it falls out of her brain with a single syllable from this girl. “I’m Kara. Is this seat taken?” She gestures to the one across from Lena, who mutely shakes her head. Kara appears unperturbed by Lena’s silence, perhaps mistaking her shock for shyness, and happily chatters on. “I was going to sit with my sister – her name’s Alex, she’s in third year – but then I thought it might be a good idea to go find some other kids in my grade, you know? And I couldn’t tell, but you looked like you might be new, as well.”  
  
“I am,” Lena manages finally. “But, um, I don’t think you want to sit here with me.” The words taste bitter in her mouth, but she owes it to Kara, who is too happy and excited to be tainted by her so early on.  
  
“Am I bothering you?” Kara looks horrified at the thought.  
  
Lena can’t help but smile a little, a brief upturn of the lips. It feels a little foreign, but she loves it. “No, of course not. It’s just, um. I’m – a _Luthor_.” She waits for the inevitable recoil, the disgust, for the quick gathering of belongings and hurried exit.  
  
“Cool. I’m a _Danvers_.” Kara offers back.  
  
“You don’t understand. My older brother, he – he did some bad stuff. Really bad.” _Like killing Muggles with magic,_ Lena finishes in her head, but she doesn’t need to voice it, because even the Muggleborns will have heard about Lex by now.  
  
“But did _you_ do bad stuff?” her unexpected companion enquires politely.  
  
“Um, no. I’m eleven,” Lena clarifies. “And I don’t want to be like him.”  
  
“Great.” Kara grins at her so genuinely that about a thousand pounds fall off Lena’s shoulders, and her spine straightens for what must surely be the first time in five years. No one has _ever_ looked at her like that before, like she’s _innocent._ “So do you know what time the food lady comes by? Because I’m really hungry. I’m always hungry. I think Alex might’ve hexed me when I was adopted.”  
  
Lena laughs softly. “You’re adopted, too?”  
  
“Yep. I used to live in one of those remote magic colonies. You know the ones that experiment with new brands of magic? But it got destroyed in the last wizarding war. I would tell you all about it, but, um, it still makes me sad.” Kara’s light dampens for a moment, like a candle flickering.  
  
“What kind of new brands?” Lena asks, wondering if this is overstepping. She’s not really sure how to hold a conversation with someone her own age – she’s never had a lot of opportunities – but questions are probably the right sort of thing.  
  
“Raw magic, mostly, like the kinds kids do before they know they’re wizards. Stuff without wands. I learned some of it, before it…” she trails off, and if anyone can understand how hard it is to talk about your past, it’s Lena, so she executes a quick subject change.  
  
“What house is your sister in?”  
  
Kara beams at the thought of her sibling (and idol, Lena suspects), and this sets her off on a rant about Gryffindor and how Alex is a chaser for the Quidditch team and Kara’s sure she’s going to be captain someday.  
  
“Do you think you’ll be in Gryffindor, too?” Lena asks, and she can imagine it, what with Kara being courageous enough to talk to a Luthor and all.  
  
But the other girl shakes her head. “I reckon I’ll be Hufflepuff. Everyone thinks you sort of fall into that house, like if you’re not smart or brave or ambitious, but I think you can choose Hufflepuff, too. Plus, Alex says the common room is near the kitchen.”  
  
When after some coaxing, Lena admits she’s terrified to end up in Slytherin, Kara demands to know why. “I don’t want to be another Luthor.”  
  
“Slytherin is for people with ambition, Lena. You can have ambition to do good things, not just bad.”  
  
The rock in the pit of her stomach starts to dissolve after that, and she fills the space it leaves with pumpkin juice and chocolate frogs once the food trolley comes around. Kara buys one of everything, but once she realises Lena has a kitten, promptly ignores most of the sweets in favour of petting Caddy until he falls asleep.  
  
When the train stops, Lena thinks about how nice it was to have a friend, even if it was only for a few hours. This idea is quickly overridden when Kara shoves the remaining candy hastily into her pockets, takes the cat in one hand and grabs Lena’s with the other, practically dragging her out of the compartment.  
  
“Come on, Lena, it’s going to be _amazing,_ ” she squeaks, and somehow, Lena finds it within herself to agree.

///

The Sorting Hat just barely glances off Kara’s head before it’s shouting _Hufflepuff_ , and cheers erupt from the yellow-clad table (along with a few very loud whoops from some of the Gryffindors, which Lena can only assume is the gleeful heckling of Kara’s sister and her friends). She shoots Lena a winning smile before disappearing into the sea of students.  
  
It seems like eons before it’s “Luthor, Lena”, and despite Kara’s earlier words, her nerves are building again. The hat is silent so long once it slips over her eyes that she’s starting to worry it’ll refuse to acknowledge her, when it whispers in a gravelly tone. “You’re smart. There’s nothing in any of our libraries you’ll find exceeds your grasp. And brave, too. If it comes to it, you will sacrifice all things to be who you have to be. There’s kindness in you, Luthor, even if it hides. And of course, ambition. I saw it in your brother, too.” She nearly cries. “But it doesn’t worry me in you, little Luthor. Because you have all the rest as well. _Slytherin_!”

///

She has three classes with Kara – Potions, Herbology, and Defence Against the Dark Arts. At first, she worries Kara will ignore her, with her green and silver tie and the rumours that tag along in her wake. Instead, the dungeon door barely has time to close behind the tiny blonde girl before she’s throwing herself into the seat next to Lena and jabbering away about her new common room and the ticklish pear painting.  
  
Somehow, on that train ride, Kara had decided that Lena was a worthy friend, and though she can't really understand it, Lena is going to do everything she can to hang onto this thing between them with both hands.

///

Lena discovers Kara is truly terrible at potions. Almost impossibly bad. She strongly suspects that even if Kara were to follow the instructions precisely to the letter (which she never actually manages to do), the liquid would still find a way to explode or solidify or dissipate into vapour. When she accidentally spills a watery concoction on Lena halfway through the first week, the class falls silent, waiting for the debut of the famous Luthor rage. Kara just laughs, scrubs the potion off Lena’s arm with the edge of her robe, and asks if she’s okay. Lena feels odd for a moment before she manages to tie the realisation down: Kara is not afraid of her. Not even a little bit.

///

What Kara lacks in Potions, she more than makes up for in Herbology. The horrible plant with red venomous spikes curls into her magic touch, and the Professor even gets her to hold a Mandrake to keep it quiet after class, even though that’s technically second year stuff. Living things always seem to want to be closer to Kara, and yeah, Lena can understand that.

///

Their first Defence Against the Dark Arts class, Professor Henshaw pulls her aside.  
  
“I knew your brother,” he tells her, in that deep and serious voice that keeps even over-excitable eleven year olds (re: Kara) completely still and silent.  
  
“I used to think I did, too,” she says. He nods, just once, and after giving her a smile (which is really too small to be an actual smile, but is somehow impossibly reassuring anyway), he never brings up Lex again.  
  
Even though there’s at least a dozen other girls and boys clamouring to be Kara’s partner when they practice spells, she always chooses Lena.

///

Kara drags her to the first Quidditch game of the season (Gryffindor vs. Ravenclaw), and screams herself hoarse, cheering loudly for Alex even when the quaffle isn’t actually near her. Lena doesn’t think she’s ever seen anybody be so passionate about anything (her family is full of apathy; towards society, towards the poor, towards Lena herself), and it warms her to know that people like Kara exist to make even things like weekend inter-house sport seem like the event of the century.  
  
It doesn’t take long for her to start cheering, too. At first, she feels stupid, showing she cares about something, but Kara grins at her, and after that it doesn’t seem silly anymore.

///

“You’re just a Mudblood the Luthors adopted to cover up Lex going completely psycho,” the boy spits at her, getting up in her space. She’d trod on his foot by accident while walking back from dinner, and he’s been yelling at her for at least a minute now. She takes it silently, knowing that if she gives even half as good as she gets, the word that she’s turning out to be just as violent as Lex will have circulated before breakfast tomorrow, and this second year will be painted as the victim of an unprovoked attack.  
  
“Hey! Why are you being mean?” The boy is at least a foot taller than Kara, but he still recoils at the sound of her scolding. Tiny Hufflepuff Kara, the little sister of the star of the Gryffindor team (and to a significant extent, the unofficial little sister of Hogwarts), who no-one has ever seen even the slightest bit cross even though they’re well into the term by now. “Don’t be rude to her, she didn’t do anything wrong.”  
  
She grabs a surprised Lena’s hand and tugs her away from the gaping offender, into the dark recesses of a nearby corridor. “Why didn’t you stand up to him?” Kara demands. Lena worries for a moment that she’s mad at her, too, but one glance at her friend’s face and she realises Kara is upset.  
  
“It’s not worth it.” She hopes Kara hears that it’s not worth the backlash, the rumours, the jeers in the halls. But as if she’s got some sort of special power, Kara listens through all the other implications, and knows what she really means.  
  
“Yes,” Kara says, with a million tons of certainty. “You are.”  
  
Then she takes Lena up to the Astronomy Tower and points out constellations to her, fingers still tightly knotted with Lena’s, until everything seems peaceful again (or maybe peaceful for the first time ever).

///

One day, Kara grabs the back of Lena’s robes and pulls her into an abandoned classroom. “Look at this,” she squeaks. “Remember that raw magic I told you about? That my colony used to do? I tried some of it. I’m not very good yet, but – watch.” Kara screws up her face in concentration, and slowly, she begins to hover, feet lifting off the ground.  
  
Lena gapes, speechless. “That’s _amazing_ , Kara. Most grown wizards can’t do magic like that.”  
  
“But you can’t tell anyone,” Kara makes her promise. “Otherwise I might get in trouble.”  
  
Lena nods gravely. It’s the first time she’s ever been entrusted with a secret.

///

Lena mostly hangs out alone on Halloween. She’s starting to make a few tentative friends in her house, but it’s hard – most people either hate or love Lex too much, and digging herself out from under his name is exactly as hard as she expected. But she thinks of Kara and her unquestioning trust and she finds it within herself to try. She will not be the girl who looks for empty compartments anymore.

///

“Where are you going for Christmas?” Kara nudges her gently.  
  
They’re sitting in the kitchen surrounded by a gaggle of House Elves. They all adore Kara (much like everyone Lena’s ever met), and keep offering her small treats. She brings them tiny trinkets, often – nothing that could be misconstrued as clothes if they don’t want them to be, but innocent little silvery charms Kara makes herself from various household objects. The elves treasure these, pinning them to their pillowcases and draping them about their necks. They’ve learned not to thank her too many times – eventually, she just goes red and stammers a lot under the weight of their gratitude (which Lena finds equally adorable and amusing) – and instead ply her with a Muggle food she seems particularly fond of.  
  
“How are your sticking pots?” Lena asks, by way of diversion.  
  
“They’re great,” Kara smiles. “But you’re changing the subject.”  
  
Lena sighs. “I’m staying here. It’ll be the best Christmas I’ve ever had,” she admits, and means it. Finally, a holiday without her mother bemoaning the injustice of Lex’s residency in Azkaban, listing Lena’s many shortcomings, and becoming more and more explicit with her pure-blood bigotry with every sip of Fire Whiskey.  
  
Kara immediately looks horrified. “You can’t stay here all _alone_. Not on _Christmas._ ” She announces this as if it is some kind of grand and unbreakable rule that Lena is a fool not to know.  
  
“I won’t go home,” Lena tells her, and she keeps her voice as soft as she always does with Kara, but the sentence has a backbone of steel, of surety.  
  
“Then I’ll stay,” Kara responds happily, going back to the little dumplings she loves so much without another word, her problem-solving done for the day.  
  
“What? You can’t stay. You’ve got a family. I won’t be the reason you miss a normal Christmas,” Lena argues, suddenly feeling dreadful.  
  
Kara shrugs. “Alex will stay with me. That’s all I need for a normal Christmas.”  
  
The next day, Lena is proudly informed by the youngest Danvers that all it took was a little pouting for Alex to cave. The effort was apparently helped along by the fact that Alex’s Muggleborn friend Sawyer is staying behind as well.

///

Lena puts off meeting Alex for as long as she can.  It’s a remarkable feat that she’s made it till now, given that Kara spends at least sixty percent of her time either with Alex, or talking about her. She learned early on that Alex is a very protective sister, and Lena cannot imagine she would take kindly to her little sibling befriending a Luthor.  
  
Kara introduces them with a “be _nice_ , Alex”. The three of them are in the Hufflepuff common room, which is neutral ground, and it’s Christmas Eve. The cheery reindeer ears adorning Kara’s head are doing nothing to ease Lena’s apprehension under Alex’s appraising gaze. The eldest Danvers is tall for a third year, and her eyes and hair are both impossibly dark, and Lena thinks she might as well be wearing a sweater with _hurt my sister and I’ll kill you_ embroidered on the front. They stand in awkward and frosty silence for a moment until Alex catches sight of the textbook peeking out from Lena’s bag, _The Combination & Integration of Ancient Magical Arts with Modern Non-Magical Sciences_. Then Alex is off on a tangent about how useful spell-work can be in forensics and how Aurors don’t know what they’re missing by ignoring Muggle advances. Kara watches their debate interestedly, with no idea what’s being said, but intrigued by it all the same.   
  
When Sawyer arrives (who Lena quickly realises is also the Maggie that Kara mentions occasionally), she drags Alex into a game of catch-the-snitch-in-the-common-room, which mostly seems to involve jumping off a lot of arm chairs and laughing. Kara tugs gently at the edge of Lena’s robe, and whispers, “She likes you.”  
It means more than Lena expects it to.

///

In the second term, a fifth year boy from Gryffindor sets a bludger on Lena with a hex, and she’s waiting to go into her History of Magic class when the solid ball of iron slams into the side of her head. Her skull aches and her tongue feels too big for her mouth and everything turns static and fuzzy, then black.  
  
As soon as she wakes up, she wishes she hadn’t. Everything hurts and it’s another one of those times when the desire to surgically remove her last name hits her like a ton of bricks. When she finally cracks an eyelid, she can make out at least three, very blurry, Karas sitting next to her bed. There’s a small pile of chocolate frogs in her lap, but she hasn’t touched them, her hands instead tangling worriedly in her blonde hair.  
  
“Hey,” Lena croaks, and it feels like it’s ripping her larynx apart, but it’s worth it, because the clouds part and the sun comes out behind Kara’s eyes.  
  
“Lena! Oh my gosh, I’m so glad you’re all right!” She dashes forward and wraps Lena in a purposefully delicate hug. Lena nearly cries, not out of pain, but because she can’t conjure up a memory of the last time someone held her like this.  
  
“Alex is gonna jinx that Lord guy really bad,” Kara murmurs.

///

Even though she saw who hexed the bludger, Lena refuses to tell any of the teachers. This wins her a reputation for not being a snitch and being tougher than she looks, and earns her the beginnings of grudging respect. For the first time, she feels like she’s taken a step forward without twelve steps back.  
  
Lena’s Head of House, Professor Grant, tells her on the record that she’s a fool for covering up for the boy, but off the record that she understands Lena will have to work ten times as hard as anyone else just to be normal, and she respects her for that.

///

Eventually, she works up the courage to stop resisting when Kara invites her to hang out with the rest of her friends. She meets Winn, the tiny Ravenclaw from her History of Magic class (and, she later learns, the one who had told Kara as soon as she was hit by the bludger), and James, the tallest boy in their year who is _dying_ to be the Keeper for Gryffindor. At first, they are a little wary of her, but she’s used to that. It’s only reasonable that they worry any description of her they’ve received from Kara has been starched by her rose-tinted glasses. But after a while, a loaned Quidditch almanac and a heated debate on magical machinery, she becomes more Lena than Luthor to them.

///

The year seems to gain an absurd amount of momentum around early March, the weeks rocketing by, perhaps egged on by the fact that things appear to be finally falling into place for Lena, or the dread of spending three months at home. The idea of the Luthor household is all the more terrible for the newfound knowledge that things like respect and hugs and friends are not pipedreams, but luxuries that even she can be allowed.  
  
All of a sudden, it’s Easter, then time trips over itself again, and exams are looming on the horizon. They drag themselves to the library early and late, often in the company of a rather stressed Alex and her own collection of third year friends, all armed with index cards, textbooks, and frowns.  
  
Lena personally loves studying, and while Kara has a similar appreciation for learning, Lena’s discovered that she’s very tactile, and only engages through experience, making the piles of reading a chore for her. She tries to make it more interesting, enchanting little models of the stars to float above Kara’s head to help her remember the constellations, using candy to practice transfiguration, and drawing diagrams in colour-changing ink.  
  
It all probably slows Lena down, but when they stumble out of their last exam, Kara wraps her arms tight around Lena and sighs out, “Thank _god._ I could _not_ have done that without you.” She’s about to say _of course you could’ve,_ but holds her tongue, instead offering herself a brief moment in which to feel needed by someone for something other than appearances.

///

In their post-exam euphoria, they all head down to the lake. Kara refuses to celebrate properly until Alex is also free (which won’t happen until that afternoon), so they settle for quietly revelling in the sensation of all their knowledge pouring out their ears as they happily discard a year’s worth of learning. James is levitating bigger and bigger rocks from the shore into the lake, each of which hovers precariously mid-air while they heckle at him gleefully, all desperately hoping this will prompt a visit from the giant squid.  
  
Lena and Winn sit on the grass, talking about Muggle technology, and all the ways they could improve it with magic. In a brief but comfortable silence, Winn stumbles out, “My dad. He was… He did bad magic, too. Cursed things, and sold them to Muggles. Usually toys. Nobody knows about it, though. I can’t imagine if everyone knew, like with -”  
  
“Like with Lex,” Lena finishes. She is struck by the odd sensation of tangible connections forming with people, little parts of her life that overlap with others’ like a Venn Diagram: adopted like Kara, a terrible family like Winn, hopeful like James.  
  
“I wanted to tell you that you’re brave for standing up under it all, and that I _know_ neither of us will end up like them,” he says.  
  
“How?” she whispers, because in a lot of ways, she’s still terrified. Because she’s so young, and Lex wasn’t all bad at eleven, and how can you know who you’ll grow up to be?  
  
“Cos we’re so afraid,” he tells her. “If we were like them, we wouldn’t care that we could be that way, you know? We don’t want to be, so we can’t be. Do you see?”  
  
Their conversation is interrupted before she can reply, by Kara throwing herself down next to her and resting her head in Lena’s lap, and by James wondering loudly if the squid would eat him if he went for a swim. “Squids aren’t typically dangerous to humans,” she tells him, and hesitantly cards her fingers through Kara’s hair. When the other girl hums happily, she does it again. James whoops and shucks his cloak, dragging Winn with him down to the lakeside.  
  
“She said _typically_ ,” Winn reminds him nervously. He looks up and catches Lena’s eye, squinting a little in the sun. He nods once, and she nods back, and it’s as if they’re confirming it to each other: _no, we don’t want to be like them._

_///_

Caddy curls up between them on the train home, and Lena is bursting with the knowledge that she didn’t have to go looking for an empty compartment but was instead hastily yanked into a full one by a handful of other kids already well on their way to a sugar high. Kara runs one hand through Caddy’s soft black fur and with the other passes every-flavour beans to Lena, who is reading aloud a Muggle manual for a dishwasher, much to the amusement of James and Kara, who have never so much as heard of one before. For Winn and herself, who are slightly more acquainted with the Muggle world (Lena having lived as one until her adoption, and never quite forgetting; Winn being a half-blood), entertainment is derived from the others’ reactions to the concepts of electricity and buttons.  
  
After Winn and James leave to try and track down the food trolley again, Kara’s head drops onto Lena’s shoulder, her eyes fluttering shut. “Hey Lena,” she mutters, voice cloudy with sleep, “I’m really glad I sat with you that first day. Really glad.”  
  
“Not as glad as I am,” Lena whispers back, but takes so long to find the words to reply that Kara is asleep by then.

///

Kara hugs her fiercely in farewell on the platform. Over her shoulder, Lena catches sight of one of her parents’ staff, here to take her to the Luthor mansion (she refuses to think of it as _home_ anymore). She’s glad and unsurprised no one from her family bothered to come.  
  
“Kara, we’ll still be friends next year, won’t we?” she asks hurriedly, aware that the underling has seen her and is cutting through the crowds towards them.  
  
“Of course,” Kara swears, looking confused, pulling away slightly to make eye contact, but still holding tightly to her.  
  
“Even if I can’t write to you?” Lena presses. “Because my mother won’t let me -”  
  
“Ms Luthor, we have a schedule to keep,” the staff member grabs her trolley with his right hand and her upper arm with his left, and begins to lever her away from Kara, who is finally forced to let go.    
  
“Why wouldn’t you be able to -” she hears Kara start to ask, but she’s being pulled away, and people are filling the space between them.  
  
She worries that it’s just a time-lapse version of what the summer will do to them anyway.  


	2. the second year

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, sorry guys, but this chapter is a bit long. I still hope you like it though. 
> 
> TW: this chapter is a little bit angstier and contains two mentions of child abuse. They are not graphic or detailed, and are rather brief allusions to past events, once at the beginning of the chapter and once at the end. I want everyone to be happy and safe, so please don’t read if this might upset you.  
> If you still would like to read, I'm happy to do something like bolding the mentions so you can skip over it.

The first thing she sees when she steps onto Platform 9¾ is not the gleaming red steam engine, or the gaggle of conductors, or the impatiently clanking cages of owls. It’s Kara, her blonde hair gently tousled by the wind, looking somehow even prettier than Lena remembers. Kara’s eyes are searching the crowd as she stands on her toes for a better view, using a grip on both her trolley and older sister to keep her balance.  
  
Lena allows herself a moment to just _stare,_ to remind herself that last year really did happen, that her friends weren’t merely cheerful characters in a lonely dream, but real, living people, who probably still remember her even after three months apart.  
  
She can tell the exact second Kara catches sight of her, because her face lights up with a bright, beaming smile that fills Lena up like Butterbeer, and she’s suddenly letting go of both Alex and her trunk to race towards Lena.  
  
The hug Lena receives happens at full velocity, Kara barely slowing down before she throws her arms around Lena’s waist and holds her tight. There’s a heartbeat of warm silence before Kara’s talking at a mile a minute. “Are you okay? Did you get any of our letters? The boys said you didn’t reply to them, either. Did something happen? Did you have a good summer anyway?”  
  
“Kara, breathe. She can only answer one question at a time,” Alex calls, looking long-suffering as she drags both trolleys over to the girls. Kara nods hurriedly, attempting to reign her energy in to a point where she can at least pretend she’s being patient.  
  
Lena wonders how much she ought to tell them. Definitely not about the hours she spent stiff as a board in the Luthor mansion corridors, hexed by her mother with a freezing curse as punishment for various miniscule missteps. She shouldn’t mention the angry rants and hours locked in her room that came with every owl that brought a letter to her from a family of “impure wizarding blood” (not to mention her anger at the fact that Lena had befriended the cousin of the Daily Prophet reporter who covered Lex’s trial). In fact, she can’t bring herself to tell Kara anything that might knock the smile off her face.  
  
“My mother stops all my letters, so I’m sorry I couldn’t reply. And, um, my summer was fine.” She thinks her voice maybe cracks a little, and judging by Alex’s expression (scepticism mixed with sympathy), and Kara’s arms tightening around her, she her lie isn’t very convincing.  
  
Lena is desperate to forget about the last three months, though, so she loudly demands to know everything that happened during the Danvers’ summer, which prompts a series of rather interesting stories, even if they are dotted with lingering concerned looks from both sisters.  
  
Later, when they’ve managed to locate the boys and are all chattering happily, thankful to be back (and to not be the youngest anymore), Alex pulls Lena aside.  
  
“Kara always wants to see the best in people, and in their lives. She’s too young to understand, really, that there are families that aren’t like ours. Where you aren’t treated like we are,” Alex pauses, her eyes never leaving Lena’s. “But I do understand. So if you’re ever home, and things are bad, this is what you need to send a letter to us through Muggle mail. Your parents won’t be able to intercept that. We can come get you. Even if we have to bust you out in the middle of the night.”  
  
A piece of paper with an address and a post code is carefully slipped into Lena’s hand, and she holds onto it impossibly tight, even though she knows she’ll never use it.

///

The train ride is cathartic, and a weight lifts from Lena’s shoulders with every mile they ride as she gets further and further away from her mother. James talks about the Hollyhead Harpies, Winn about an old computer he bought, and Kara about her surety that Lena’s kitten is in fact part pygmy puff, given that his net weight barely exceeds that of an orange. Lena grins like an idiot, because this is the best she’s felt in ages.

///

On their second day of classes, Lena finds Kara in tears after what was apparently a particularly rough lesson with Professor Carr, who has a reputation for grinding the younger students to dust. Lena’s never been really sure what to do when girls cry, but she does her best.

She takes Kara’s hand (it’s so soft and warm and they live in a world with magic but she still wonders how the tingles it gives her are possible) and leads her down to the very edge of the forest, which isn’t technically out of bounds, unless someone catches them.

By the time they’ve found a baby Bowtruckle and Kara is happily playing with him, her tears have dried, and Lena relaxes. They miss a class or two, but Lena doesn’t mind – she’s ahead anyway, and if it made Kara feel better, she’d skip a whole term.

///

They’re all hanging out in the courtyard, enjoying the weekend and the respite from classes that it brings. Lena’s brought her transfiguration textbook, because ostensibly, she’s trying to study, but in reality the words blurred to meaninglessness as soon as Kara started gently toying with her fingers and singing the school song under her breath so some ridiculously upbeat Muggle pop anthem.  
  
James is playing with a rather crumpled third-hand snitch, letting it flutter tiredly a few feet away from him before leaping up and snatching it back triumphantly. Winn is watching in envy, having long since given up on attempting to participate in activities that require hand-to-eye coordination.  
  
With a particularly daring evasive manoeuvre, the snitch eludes James’ grasp, and makes a break for the open sky. Lena sees it out of the corner of her eye, and without turning from her book, darts her hand out and grabs it firmly out of the air.  
  
“Watch it, James. The seniors will get mad at us if we keep having to get them to summon it back for you,” Lena mutters. She waits for a reply, but none comes, until -  
  
“Holy shit, Lena, that was fast,” James squeaks, actually _squeaks_ , and it’s so far from his usual timbre that Lena glances up in surprise, only to find all three of them staring at her in shock.

She shrugs, and holds the snitch out for James to take it back. But he doesn’t move.  
  
“I’m serious, Lena. That was really impressive. Where did you learn that?”  
  
She fiddles nervously with the ends of her hair, until Kara’s fingers reach up and tangle with hers to keep her still. “I – um, Lex used to practice Quidditch with me. Back when the Luthors first adopted me. I suppose he must have already been doing terrible things back then, but all I remember is that he was the first person in my whole life who tried to play with me.”

This last part comes out so rushed and softly that Lena’s sure even Kara, who is sitting next to her, mustn’t have heard it. The memories of summer afternoons with Lex, she sitting on his old childhood broomstick and he tossing the snitch, taste bitter in her mouth these days. There’s a part of her, though, one that she wouldn’t readily admit exists, that still treasures those moments she had with her big brother before she lost him to himself.  
  
The others go silent. Lena’s sensory perception is reduced to the rhythmic pressure of Kara’s thumb as it swipes across the back of her hand, calming her in a comforting caress.  
  
“With reflexes like that and flying skills like yours, you should go to the Slytherin team try outs next week,” James suggests eagerly, but Lena’s already shaking her head. She’s not sure how to explain that Quidditch and Lex are inextricably linked inside her head, but Kara seems to understand somehow anyway.  
  
“It’s okay to have good memories of him, Lena,” Kara murmurs, too quietly for anyone but her to hear. “He’s your brother. You’re allowed to love that version of him.”  
  
There’s no judgement in her voice, as if she knows that Lena’s been searching for a way to hold onto and let go of Lex all at once for so long.

///

The try-outs are packed. It seems that suddenly every Slytherin in school has become interested in joining the team. Lena would just turn around and go back to her dorm were it not for the presence of her friends in the stands, already whooping for her even though it hasn’t even started yet. James is doing some kind of made-up war dance while the other two clap him on.

They all look completely ridiculous, and Lena feels lucky.

///

She makes the team. It’s a rush to know she’s good at something, that she has a talent, that people she doesn’t know would voluntarily pick her for their group. Of course, this is nothing compared to how it feels when Kara hugs her tight and kisses her cheek in congratulations.

///

The next time Professor Carr upsets Kara, Lena sets Peeves on him, as the result of some tough negotiations with the poltergeist that involved the exchange of a few sickles and the divulging of the current location of the disappearing staircase.

///

One Saturday afternoon, Lena takes Kara to her dorm to give her a birthday present. She’s sure that their passage through the common room will attract jeers, but apparently the Hufflepuff is so well liked that even Lena’s least polite peers seem unable to so much as frown at her.  
  
“Wow, your dorm room is pretty empty,” Kara observes. “Why are there only four beds? There are twelve girls in mine.”  
  
Lena shrugs. “Two transferred to Beauxbatons over the summer. I don’t mind. Lots more space. And I think Slytherin dorms are the biggest anyway, we’ve got most of the castle’s basement to ourselves.”  
  
At the start of the year, each of the remaining girls had set up dividers around their beds for privacy, but designated the empty ones as common space, and these are now covered in crumpled clothes and candy stockpiles. Lena tugs Kara over to her bed, pushing her gently to sit down on it, before she reaches down to pull the tiny cage from its hiding place.  
  
“Here,” she presents it awkwardly, having never really given a present before, or at least one that she had the chance to put any kind of meaning into.  
  
Kara squeals in excitement, pulling off the cloth covering to reveal the tiny, bright yellow winged pygmy that Lena had got delivered from Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes earlier that week. Kara gapes, and for a moment, Lena is worried that she’s done the whole _birthday present_ thing completely wrong. But when Kara throws her arms around her, and Lena can feel her physically vibrating with excitement against her, she realises she’s done alright.  
  
“I love him, I love him. Oh my gosh, Lena,” Kara babbles, “he’s adorable!”  
  
The _you’re adorable_ sits on her tongue unsaid. Instead, Lena says, “He can deliver letters, too. But he’s tiny, so only small memos and he can’t take them very far at all. I’m sorry, I didn’t know if you would want an owl or -”  
  
“He’s perfect.”

///

The morning before Lena’s first Quidditch match, she’s dying of nerves. This is her one chance to become _Lena, Slytherin Seeker,_ rather than _Lena, Lex Luthor’s little sister_ , and she can’t blow it.

Kara tries to coax her to eat about fifteen different foods, to no avail.

It’s against Ravenclaw, so only Winn is suffering from divided loyalty.  
“I’ll cheer when we score,” he tells her, “but also when you catch the snitch.” The way he says _when,_ not _if_ – Winn, who could calculate probabilities in his sleep – calms the nerves just enough that she won’t throw up.

She imagines the team must be quite a sight, walking out onto the field: all boys in fifth year or older (as far as her house has come in the last few decades, some prejudices are yet to be left behind), and her, trailing behind them, and clocking in at about a third of their size.

///

One particularly vindictive Ravenclaw beater sends about a dozen bludgers her way, but apart from a harsh bruise on the thigh, she gets away unscathed. Her fist closing around the tiny golden sphere ends the game with a ten-point lead to Slytherin, and when the crowd cheers in victory, she’s almost sure she can make out Kara’s voice among all the rest.

///

Lena wakes up to something soft bumping repeatedly against her cheek. Blearily, she cracks an eye open, and in the darkness, just manages to make out the shadowy cloud that is Kara’s new winged pygmy puff, Wiggles. Wrapped around his ankle is a tiny note that, when she holds in up in the dim glow of the moon, reads _Hufflepuff common room?_  
  
She pulls a sweater over her head and sets off without hesitation, knowing that it’s probably important at this time of night, and that even if it isn’t, if Kara wants her there, there’s no way she’d be anywhere else.  
  
She taps the barrels carefully, exactly as Kara had taught her back in first year, and sneaks inside. She suspects most of the house would not take kindly to midnight Slytherin visitors, but she’s already hated by the majority of the school anyway, so a little more animosity doesn’t make any difference to her.  
  
Lena finds Kara curled up in front of the fire, her shoulders shaking gently. She carefully closes the distance between them, sliding down onto the carpet beside the other girl. “Hey,” she whispers, and when Kara turns to face her, she can see the tear stains down her cheeks, and the unshed ones that are swimming in her bright blue eyes.  
  
“You came,” Kara breathes back.  
  
“Of course I came,” Lena says, confused. “I’ll always come if you need me.”  
  
Kara starts sobbing again, so Lena just pulls her up into her lap, and gently rubs her back in the ebbing firelight and prays that she doesn’t hyperventilate. The Hufflepuff’s head curls into the crook of Lena’s neck as she quietens, and Lena can feel the coolness of salt water against her skin. Kara is warm and soft and Lena thinks she’d be happy to have her arms around her like this forever.  
  
“I keep having nightmares about my colony,” Kara murmurs finally. “Usually I go to Alex, but she has a test tomorrow, and I don’t want to wake her. Are you mad?”  
  
“We’re friends, Kara. You can wake me up every night of the week if you need to. Do – do you want to talk about the dream?” Lena asks tentatively.  
  
“I… I r-remember my m-mother putting me on a broomstick behind my older cousin, Kal, and her screaming at him to fly. He t-told me not to look behind us but I d-did, and I saw all the p-people in dark robes and e-everything _burned_.” Every sentence punctuated by another sob.  
  
Lena isn’t sure what to say to comfort her. She doesn’t have any real experience to draw from. “Maybe someday, when you’re ready, you can tell me the good things about your village. What you remember. But if you don’t want to talk about it now, I’m not going to ask you to.”

Kara shakes her head, so Lena just holds her tighter and closer and thinks about how much she wishes there was a spell that could take the pain out of one person and put it into someone else.

“I’m a Muggleborn. You knew that. I don’t recall a lot, because I was only four when I was adopted, but I think you’d like the Muggle world, Kara. Did you know, that because they don’t have owls, you have to put little stickers on letters to send them? Or that they put stripes on cars because they think it makes them look faster?” She continues to list things, until the tears dry up and she earns a few soft giggles for some of the more ridiculous (and often heavily exaggerated) claims, and finally, Kara falls asleep.

She stays up, staring into the fire, and when a few rowdy first years clatter into the common room at dawn, she glares at them so fiercely that they tip-toe the rest of the way.

///

For Halloween, Kara, Winn and Lena find a charm that causes a tiny black cloud to follow Alex around all day, hovering just out of reach and making her appear rather like a grumpy cartoon character, much to her younger sister’s amusement. It’s technically third year magic, but it’s worth all the practice it took when they get to sit back and watch Alex chase Kara around the courtyard, threatening retribution.

///

Lena doesn’t get to finish out the Gryffindor vs. Slytherin match that happens right before Christmas. It starts off well, with a few friendly and half-hearted bludger hits and some pretty incredibly quaffle shots from Alex.  
  
Lena and Maggie are both circling the pitch above them, scanning for that minute glint, the flash of incoming victory. She likes Sawyer, and hopes that it’s a close run thing between them, but she’ll never hear the end of it from the Danvers if she loses the snitch to their friend. About twenty minutes in, one of the Gryffindor chasers flies up beside her, too near for it to be an accident, hedging into her space and limiting her manoeuvrability.  
  
“I had a cousin,” he hisses, just loud enough that she can hear him over the wind but the crowd below remains oblivious, “a Muggle. His name was Derek. Do you know him?” Lena, confused, shakes her head. “Well you should. Seeing as your _brother_ killed him,” he spits. “He was _nineteen_.”  
  
For a moment, he pulls back, then slams into her again at full force. He’s easily got thirty pounds on Lena, and she’s immediately knocked off course. The chaser retreats even further, and when he charges again, they collide with even more speed. His shoulder smashes into her ribs, and the next time, she’s too winded to even try and evade him. The students below begin to boo when they realise foul play is going on above the rest of the game, and Lena hears the distant shrieking of the time out whistle, but the chaser doesn’t relent.  
  
“I’ve been waiting so long to make you feel even some of what I did,” the boy yells, and with one last rush, knocks her head long into one of the pitch’s checked towers.  
  
Lena knows, in the back of her mind, that in the split second before contact, she has a heartbeat to change her course to one that will leave her relatively intact. The moment comes and passes and she doesn’t take the chance, because for the first time in a long while of enduring punishment for her family, she feels like yeah, she deserves it.

///

“And here I was, thinking you were staying out of trouble. I haven’t seen you since that bludger last year, Miss Luthor,” the matron notes, smiling warmly at her.  
  
“I feel like I got run over,” Lena groans, attempting to sit upright but eventually deciding it’s not worth the pain and effort. At the Healer’s confused look, she clarifies, “Like I got pummelled.”  
  
“Oh. You did. Hit the tower and fell a solid sixty feet. Very impressive.”  
  
Lena tries to peek at her clipboard, but the English language simply isn’t cooperating with her eyes, and after a few seconds of staring at blurry letters, she gives up. “What does it say?”  
  
“Trouble reading is your concussion in action, Lena. You broke your right arm, collarbone, three ribs and your left ankle. Quite the selection. You’re on enough potions to start an apothecary, though, so you’ll be right as rain in a few days, don’t you worry.”  
  
“Thank you,” Lena croaks, wishing fervently she was still unconscious. Even the hit to the head she had taken last year hadn’t hurt quite this much. “Is there something I can take to go back to sleep?”  
  
The matron nods. “But, I do have quite the crowd of agitated second years outside waiting to see you, as well as about three quarters of a very apologetic Gryffindor Quidditch team. I’m sure you’d like to see them first.”  
  
Lena nearly nods, but the memory of the chaser’s words hangs heavy in her mind. Can she really look at Kara, knowing about Derek? Can she face James, with the face of a student who lost a loved one to her brother in the forefront of her thoughts? Could she accept Winn’s hug, weighed down by the idea of a grave for someone not even twenty years old?  
  
“Just the sleeping draught, please,” she says.

///

She gets away with a full three days in the hospital wing with no contact with anyone. It’s peaceful, and mostly she sleeps, hiding from the guilt in the soft embrace of unconsciousness. Lena’s always been able to hate Lex for what he did to others, but bubbling up inside her is a resentment for what he did to her, as well. She doesn’t know how to carry all this, how to load all his sins onto her back and walk around as if it’s nothing. He’s locked in Azkaban, and still she is getting hurt by him.  
  
During lunch on the fourth day, the doors of the ward are unceremoniously thrown open by an incensed-looking Alex Danvers. The brunette’s eyes flick over the rows of beds until she locates Lena, and storms over to her.  
  
“Are you feeling any better?” She barks it like a military command. Lena winces.  
  
“Y-yes. My bones are… less broken.”  
  
“Good. Then there’s no reason my little sister can’t come visit you, hmm?”  
  
Lena breaks eye contact, searching for a way to explain that Kara is _Kara_ , and she’s decided that someone as tainted as Lena shouldn’t be around a person like that anymore. She settles for, “I don’t want to see her.” It’ll have the same effect.  
  
“ _Bullshit._ ”  
  
Lena starts. She’s never heard Alex swear. “I’m sorry?”  
  
The eldest Danvers rolls her eyes. “You heard me. On Saturday, you two are best friends, and now, what, she’s nobody?”  
  
Lena scoffs. “I am _not_ her best friend. She’s got Winn and James and _you_ , and I’m just… I’m a _Luthor_ ,” she spits. It tastes like venom, but she doesn’t try to swallow down the flavour anymore. Let it be what it is. Let them hate her. After all, they need to hate someone.  
  
Alex’s gaze softens. “Lena, kid, _Luthor_ doesn’t mean _Lex._ I thought you knew that.” Her hand reaches for Lena’s, and even though she flinches away, Alex grabs her fingers and holds them tightly. Her touch has the gentle authority of an older sibling, even when Kara isn’t there.  
  
“I – I, just. He’s _everywhere,_ Alex. He hurt _everyone._ How can I drag Kara into that? Or any of them?”  
  
“Lena, they’re your friends. They love you.”  
At this, Lena stiffens, and jerks her hand away. In her world, _love_ means _lies._  
  
“Leave. Please,” she says, and it’s in that falsely impassive voice she uses with her mother.  
  
Alex must see something in her eyes, because she stands up and steps back.  
  
_That’s it,_ Lena thinks, _walk away._ She’s far more used to seeing the backs of people than the fronts of them.  
  
“Don’t think we’re quitting on you, Lena,” she calls out, before the doors close behind her.

///

On her way to her first class since getting out of the hospital wing, Lena is unceremoniously grabbed by the back of her robes and dragged into a nearby broom closet.  
  
“What -” she begins, once the door swings shut behind her, only to be cut off by a sudden, warm, and entirely unanticipated hug. Judging from the blonde hair invading her field of vision, and the vague scent of vanilla (not to mention that weird tingly thing her body always does around the other girl), it’s Kara. For a second, she relaxes, feels her arms come up around Kara of their own accord, before she remembers exactly why she was avoiding the other girl in the first place. She wriggles, albeit half-heartedly. “Kara, I’m not -”  
  
“You’re sad,” Kara whispers into her shoulder.

She doesn’t try to say anything else. Just holds Lena until she stops her weak attempts at resistance, goes silent, and eventually starts to cry. _Sad._ That about sums it up. She doesn’t know much time elapses with her listing off Lex’s crimes into the crook of Kara’s neck, waiting for the moment she’s finally too disgusted and leaves Lena alone in the cupboard.  
  
When she’s finally cried herself out, and Kara is still there, still smiles at her, Lena allows herself to want to believe that what Alex said in the hospital wing is true.

///

“I’m going to destroy you, Luthor.” They are neck-deep in an incredibly competitive and underhanded game of wizarding chess, and at this point, she frankly wouldn’t be surprised if Winn started cackling like a Disney villain.  
  
“You can try, I’m unbeatable,” Lena taunts, running her finger along the edge of the board and inspecting it for non-existent dust, feigning nonchalance.  
  
“It’s true,” James pipes up. “She creamed me.”  
  
Winn rolls his eyes. “You do the exact same moves every game, Olsen. Even _Kara_ can beat you, and she lets all the pieces have a say like a democracy.”  
  
“What is it with you and calling people by their last names when you get stressed?” Lena laughs, pushing her hand through her hair as she calculates her next play.  
  
He pouts. “I’m tiny, and it makes me feel authoritative.”  
  
“You’re not _that_ tiny.” Kara’s voice rings out across the room, finally returning from the library, having at last conquered Carr’s latest and most vicious essay assignment. A thick scroll of parchment is clutched triumphantly in her hand.  
  
“Want me to proofread that for you?” Lena asks, and Kara nods gratefully at about a thousand miles a minute, before throwing herself down into Lena’s armchair. It’s really only big enough for one and a half small people, so Kara ends up mostly in Lena’s lap, but she doesn’t mind.  
  
“You can finish playing for me,” Lena tells her, gesturing to the board as she unrolls the parchment, knowing this will certainly lead to her being slaughtered by Winn.  
  
The Ravenclaw chuckles gleefully. “I hope you know that I’m still going to count this as a win against you, Lena.”

“I know,” she says, not lifting her eyes from where Kara has misspelled _revitalisation._

_///_

In the end, Gryffindor wins the Quidditch Cup, but most of the school isn’t terribly happy about it, given they only beat Slytherin by taking out their seeker. Lena strongly suspects this has a lot less to do with anyone liking her, and much more to do with having a legitimate reason to dissent their own houses not having prevailed.  
  
Slytherin still has one last game against Hufflepuff, but as neither team has much to gain, it’s a very dramatic and friendly game, with many improbably effective quaffle shots and some ancient flying formations that Lena’s sure haven’t been used since the Middle Ages. All in all, it’s the most fun she’s ever had playing Quidditch, but she thinks this is due to the fact that their usual seventh year commentator is out sick, and Professor Grant, in what Lena is sure she must now consider a lapse in judgement, has let Kara take the microphone.  
  
“Johnson’s got the quaffle – go Johnson! – he’s really nice, one time he gave me a chocolate frog… I _am_ being impartial, Professor Grant, I’m just giving the people the facts. Johnson shoots – oh, blocked by Daniels. That was a really sweet move, maybe he can teach _me_ that…”  
  
Lena laughs to herself as she circles above the pitch, eyes searching desparately. For once, she’s not too interested in catching the snitch and ending the game.

///

Exams, for Lena, will be a breeze. She’s studied so much throughout the year that most of the information is indelibly printed on her brain. Kara, however, is having no such luck.  
  
“I’m so bored,” she groans, pressing her face into the pages of her transfiguration textbook. “Maybe I’m meant to be a Muggle. I bet they don’t have to study to use their little _dishwashers._ ”  
  
Lena decides not to ruin the dream and inform Kara about ‘high school’. Instead, she absently runs her finger gently up and down the top of Kara’s spine while she reads – it’s a technique they learned in Herbology for calming a Venomous Tantacular, but Lena has learned it’s also incredibly effective on Kara.  
  
“Um, Kara?” she whispers, once she’s glanced up from her own book, and realised, with some alarm, that her friend is floating a neat six inches off her armchair.  
  
“What?”  
  
“You’re levitating.”  
  
“Oh.” Kara thuds back onto the cushion. “Whoops. I’ve been practicing raw magic a lot, lately,” she offers, by way of explanation. “I found it helps with the nightmares – remembering the good stuff, like you said. But I can’t control it all the time.”  
  
“Can you fly? Like as if you were on a broom?” Lena asks eagerly.  
  
“Not yet. Not without crashing. But I’m getting there,” Kara grins back at her, and Lena feels a little bit like she’s flying, too.

///

After their final tests, when the two of them are sitting in the kitchens eating contraband ice cream, Lena says, “I need you not to write to me this summer.” With the last week of term just around the corner, the memories of her mother and freezing curses and punishments for letters are becoming more vivid in her mind.  
  
Kara pouts. “What? Why not? I know you can’t always reply, but -”  
  
Lena sighs, and with a deep breath, decides to tell Kara the bare minimum. Just the absolute least she needs to know to ensure this summer is slightly better than the last, but also that Kara isn’t offended. So in a long, mumbled rush, she explains how her mother feels about the Danvers family not being pureblood, about Clark Kent, and then the hours spent stiff in corridors under the effects of _Petrificus Totalis,_ and all the bruised knees and broken noses that came from her inevitable falls. All the physical damage easily fixed instantly by magic; the mental kind, less so.

By the time she’s stopped talking, Lena can see the tears swimming in Kara’s eyes. “Oh, god, don’t cry. I don’t know what to do when you cry.”  
  
Kara’s grip on her hand so tight that Lena’s knuckles burn. 

“You can’t go home to that,” Kara tells her. “There’s got to be a way to -”  
  
“Kara, there’s nothing I can do without getting expelled from Hogwarts, or causing more trouble than it’s worth.”  
  
“Nothing’s more trouble than you’re worth.”  
  
“That’s sweet Kara,” Lena mumbles, “but this is the way it is.”  
  
She can tell from the look in the other girl’s eyes that she’s not going to drop it, but Lena is just so _tired_ that she doesn’t have anything else to say, and nothing else left to try.

///

When they get off the train, Kara hugs her so hard that her ribs hurt, but she couldn’t care less. 

After about two minutes, though, Lena says, “Kara. You’ve got to let go. You can’t hug me all summer.”  
  
“Watch me,” comes the muffled reply.  
  
Lena smiles, even though she’s trying to be stern. “I’ll be okay. I’ll see you in September. And don’t worry, if I really need help, I’ll send you something by Muggle mail. You can come rescue me.” Lena knows she’ll do nothing of the sort, but the idea seems to comfort Kara enough that she relaxes her grip, just a little. 

Lena has to leave, world beyond the platform is waiting, but she still lets Kara hold her just a few seconds longer, committing the feeling to memory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HMU on tumblr @ teamsupercorp  
> Let me know what you think and give me any suggestions you have in the comments :) thanks for reading


	3. the third year

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys,  
> In this chapter, it was really hard to maintain the balance between angst and fluff. I ended up cutting a lot, because ultimately, I never wanted for this to be a dark fic. I know the snippets-in-time style can make it a bit choppy, so if that's getting too annoying, let me know.  
> Your comments give me life, by the way. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to reply to them?? but please know I am so thankful and get so excited every time one of you says you're enjoying the story. As always, some of the characters and their actions require a little suspension of disbelief, but hey, what's fanfiction for.

Two weeks into the summer, Lena turns thirteen. Even though it’s still early in the morning when she gets up, the house is already empty and quiet. She tries not to let that sit heavy in her chest.  
  
“Happy birthday to me,” she mutters drily, staring up at the ceiling. When she was younger, she used to imagine what it might be like to have a normal family on a day like today. To have Lex, an ordinary, good, probably-working-at-the-Ministry version of Lex run in and present her with an amusingly terrible gift; to have her mother kiss her forehead, or her father comment on how fast she is growing up.  
  
These days, she instead wishes that her birthday occurred during the school term, like Kara’s, and she could spend it with her friends.

///  
  
When she wakes on the morning of the last day of June, it is to the news that Lex Luthor has escaped Azkaban. Her parents have already left for the Ministry, and despite the break-out having occurred almost twelve hours earlier, no one roused her to tell her first hand – instead, she finds out from the headline of the copy of the Daily Prophet left on the dining room table.  
  
Her first thoughts are of the families of his victims, and how this will have robbed them of what little peace they had. Her next are of her brother – where he is, whether he’ll contact them, what he plans to do.

///

“It would be prudent for you to make yourself scarce, Lena,” her mother tells her over breakfast the next day. “I imagine it won’t be long before the Aurors are sniffing around our house, and doing their best to make life difficult. We all know what a terrible liar you are, sweetheart, and how questionable your loyalties can be. If Lex were to attempt to reach out to us, or seek refuge here… Well, it would be a terrible shame for you if you got in the way of that.”  
  
“You want to send me away?” Lena asks, and she knows she should shoot for an indignant tone, but the words come out hopeful, anyway. “Where?”  
  
Her mother sighs. “Do you not see how busy I am, Lena, how stressed? Does it seem that I have the time to plan an itinerary for you? Go to Germany, if it suits you. I don’t much care where you find yourself, as long as you can be back promptly for any press events that might help Lex.”  
  
“Could I perhaps – would you and father let me stay with one of my friends from Hogwarts?”  
  
Lillian’s eyebrow arches, and it’s a small movement, but somehow terribly cutting all the same. “You mean there are people at that dreadful school who can tolerate you?”  
  
“Yes, mother,” she replies, knowing better than to react to her belittling. “Might I send an owl and ask?”  
  
Her mother shrugs. “Again, Lena, I simply… do _not_ care.”  
  
Lena smiles. With Lex to occupy all her attention, her mother’s usual animosity towards her has been hedged out by apathy, and she couldn’t have asked for a better belated birthday present.  
  
Lillian’s words are said like a dismissal, but Lena chooses to interpret them as permission, and rushes off to their tiny owlery. She writes to Kara as briefly and clinically as she can, well aware that her mother is extremely likely to fall back on old habits and intercept Lena’s letter anyway. As she explains the situation, she apologises for the inconvenience profusely, and is sure to highlight the fact that it would likely be for a week or two at most; just until the public attention on the Luthors has lessened, or Lex is re-apprehended by the Aurors.  
  
When she releases the owl into the sky, she crosses her fingers and wishes harder than she has in a long time.

///

The reply arrives before dawn the next day, born by a very tired owl that has quite clearly made a round-trip. After about three tangential sentences expressing her excitement at the idea of Lena coming to stay with them, Kara gets around to confirming that her parents are, indeed, okay with it. Apparently, Alex is looking forward to having someone to practice Quidditch with who does not “gratuitously rule-break” (Kara insists she is developing innovative new manoeuvres).

///

Lena takes a Muggle train to the Danvers house, turning down her father’s offer to have one of the staff Aparate with her there. Ostensibly, it’s because she’s taking Muggle Studies next term, and wants to re-introduce herself to their culture, but in reality, she can’t bear to bring one of her family’s underlings into Kara’s space, irreparably tainting it with the Luthor poison.

It’s about a five mile walk from the station to their street, but Lena doesn’t mind. Her parents rarely let her out of the house over the summer, so the fresh air is worth the blisters dragging her suitcase gives her hands (it, like most everything else her family acquires – including her – is designed more for appearances than anything else). She keeps Caddy perched in the crook of her other arm, sure that if she’d left him behind, no one would’ve fed him.  
  
Kara’s home (and it is a home, not like the Luthor mansion, which is more an abandoned museum than anything) is right on the beach. It’s bright and quaint and idyllic, and Lena imagines that Kara’s time here must surely be like something out of a storybook.  
  
She’s barely at the gate when the front door is thrown open and Kara barrels out, awkwardly skidding to a halt to ensure her hug doesn’t knock Lena over like a bowling pin. The little wooden gate is still between them when she pulls them together, and some of the palings are digging into Lena’s thigh, but she’s still glad Kara didn’t wait. She’s missed human contact, but more than that – much more – she’s missed contact with Kara. When she hugs back, she keeps her hands curled into fists, to ensure that her ruptured blisters won’t get blood on her friend’s shirt.  
  
“I thought I wasn’t going to see you all summer,” Kara breathes into her shoulder, her voice suspiciously shaky. “I’m so glad you’re here. I missed you.”  
  
Lena holds her tighter, and says, “I missed you, too.” It’s the first time she’s ever said that to anyone, and it hits her right in the chest, how much she means it. She’s spent the last four weeks trying to ration her thoughts about the other girl to avoid the inevitable feelings of loneliness and longing for September that accompany them, but now, she needs no such restrictions.    
  
Just as Lena finally shifts away, Alex steps out into the yard as well. She offers a lopsided grin that Lena cannot help but gently return. “Couldn’t go three months without getting beat at Quidditch, huh, Luthor?” she teases softly, and Kara hisses at her to stop being mean. Lena cannot help but laugh a little at them, comforted and saddened by the image of what older siblings ought to be like. “For real, though, I’m glad you’re okay,” says Alex, and Lena knows she doesn’t just mean _travelled safe._  
  
Kara grabs her hand to tug her inside, but gasps slightly when her fingers come away red and sticky.  
  
“Oh, god, sorry,” Lena mutters, hurriedly to wiping her palms on her jeans. It stings. “I didn’t mean to -”  
  
“It’s okay,” Kara assures her immediately. “You don’t have to apologise for everything, you know. Wait,” – Kara glances from the suitcase to Lena’s damaged hands, and puts two and two together – “did you _walk_ here?”  
  
“Only from the train station.”  
  
“That’s _ages._ We could’ve Apparated to get you, you know,” Kara says.  
  
“I didn’t want you to go to any more trouble for me,” Lena replies resolutely. “I’m already imposing.”  
  
“No, you’re not!” Kara must see in Lena’s eyes that she doesn’t believe her, because her own gaze narrows. “You’re not.” Her expression shifts into the one Lena has long since figured means she’s going to prove something – last time it made an appearance, it was confirmed Kara could indeed fit thirty-seven every-flavour beans into her mouth at once.  
  
“Come on, mum will fix your hands,” Alex says, grabbing Lena’s case off of her and walking back through the front door, leaving the two girls to follow in her wake.

///

Eliza is almost confusingly nice. She casts a healing spell on Lena’s hands, offers her a drink, and charms her luggage up the stairs, all apparently without expecting anything in return. In the Luthor household, everything is part of an elaborate system of business negotiations, calculated taking and giving – and yet, as far as she can tell, none of the Danvers want anything from her. It’s disorientating, and she cannot help but wonder how long the illusion will last.

///

“Okay, this is my room,” Kara says, pushing open the first door on the second storey, “but we haven’t got a guest bedroom, so you’ll be sharing with me in here.”  
Lena’s never had the opportunity to share anything with anyone in her whole life.  
  
Kara’s room is almost exactly what she expected: soft colours, lots of windows, a sporadic but adorable collection of furniture and a curiously random selection of other belongings. She stares for a moment, perhaps too long, because Kara’s expression turns concerned.  
  
“I – I just, your room is very different to mine," Lena explains hurriedly.  
  
“Like it’s smaller?”  
  
“No, it’s like you got to pick the stuff in it.” She doesn’t mean to complain, but the way Lena can see Kara’s personality reflected in her surroundings is enviable.  
Kara’s mouth twists, and Lena is afraid she’s said too much.  
  
“I’ve been so worried about you, all summer, Lena. There was all that stuff you told me in the kitchens last term, and then Lex escaped, and I just…” She sighs, probably realising that Lena, like last time, won’t want to discuss it. “Are you okay?” she asks finally. “Really?”  
  
Lena considers lying, but when Kara tangles their fingers and tugs her over to sit on her bed, she can’t bring herself to. “No. I never thought Lex would get out, you know? I thought his victims would have justice, and that everyone would be safe. But now it’s ruined. He ruins everything.”  
  
Lena looks around at the soft blue walls and at the waves she can see through the window, and decides right then she doesn’t want Lex invading this place, too. “Can we try and forget it all, please? I’m so excited to be here. With you. And I know it’s only for two weeks, but maybe we can try and cram as much normal summer stuff into it as we can?”  
  
Kara giggles. “What, like we’re studying for an exam on summer?”  
  
Lena grins. “Exactly like that.”

///

The next five days are a whirlwind, and completely different to anything else Lena has ever experienced.  
  
Kara teaches her how to bake cookies. Alex teaches her how to bake cookies without burning them.  
  
They play Quidditch on the beach, collect shells, and go swimming, even though Lena doesn’t know how to do more than cautiously wade and most days the surf is too cold for them to stay in very long.  
  
Kara’s pygmy puff, Wiggles, finds a new hobby in chasing Caddy about the house; Lena’s rather unintelligent kitten is yet to work out he is much bigger that the winged puff, and in fact has teeth, thus giving him the undisputed evolutionary advantage.  
  
Lena makes an effort to help out with chores wherever possible, although she knows that there is no real way she can repay the Danvers for their hospitality.

///  
  
Before lunch on Saturday, Eliza suggests that Lena borrow Alex’s owl and send a letter to her parents to tell them how she’s doing. Lena waves her off. “Oh, don’t worry about it. They won’t even notice I’m gone.” Eliza’s expression changes then, but Lena can’t read it, so she lets it go.

///

From her mattress set up at the foot of Kara’s bed, Lena can hear the other girl muttering in her sleep. The name _Clark_ is repeated over and over, and eventually, she starts to cry. Lena isn’t sure what the protocol is, but she can’t bear to simply lie there and listen to her friend’s sobs.  
  
She throws off her covers and goes to sit on the edge of Kara’s bed. Shaking her gently, Lena whispers, “Kara. Kara. Wake up, you’re having a nightmare.” After several moments, her eyes flicker open, but consciousness does nothing to stop her tears.  
  
Lena remembers last year, and that night on the floor of the Hufflepuff common room. “Do – do you want me to hold you for a bit?” She thanks the darkness for the fact that Kara cannot see how red she’s gone, certain that it’s a stupid suggestion.  
  
But then Kara’s nodding, shifting over to make room, so Lena lies down beside her and wraps her arm around the blonde, letting her fingers trail lightly up and down her spine, sliding over each ridge of vertebrae.  
  
“Breathe, Kara,” she murmurs. She recalls from stories that at this point, people usually sing a lullaby to help bring sleep. Feeling a little like a failure, Lena realises that she doesn’t know any. As a substitute, she begins to tell Kara the only fairy tale she knows, in the original French. Lillian had always been insistent on Lena learning multiple languages, and now, she is thankful for it, thankful for the way the unfamiliar tongue seems to roll over Kara, calming her, slowing her wracking sobs.  
  
Lena means to move back to her own bed once Kara feels better, she does. But her friend’s grip on her hand is so tight, and she’s so warm, that somehow, Lena finds herself falling asleep as well.  
  
For the first time since Lex’s escape, she isn’t haunted by dreams.

///

Winn, who lives in the Muggle town over the hill, comes over for a day. Kara only beats him at wizarding chess because Lena whispers suggestions of what moves to make into her ear, but both Lena and Winn let her count the victory as her own in their group’s ongoing tournament, anyway. 

///

“What did you do for your birthday?” Kara asks, staring in awe at her fingernails as Lena paints them. Apparently, this is another Muggle product that never made it to the wizarding world, and Kara is in love with it.  
  
She shrugs. “Nothing.” She thinks that sounds a tad less pathetic than _I sat around and wished you guys were there._  
  
Kara gasps. “That is unacceptable. Birthdays are important.”  
  
“Well, I promise that when you turn thirteen in November, we’ll do something cool. We can go to Hogsmeade this year, remember?” Lena says reassuringly.  
  
“That’s not what I meant. We have to do something for _your_ birthday. Right now.” Kara makes as if to get up.  
  
“Wait! Jeez, Kara. You’ve got to wait for the polish to dry.”  
  
They make cupcakes, and even though they end up tasting terrible, it’s the best not-quite-birthday Lena’s ever had.

///

She gets to stay with the Danvers for almost a month before the Luthors need her to make an appearance at some press event to deal with the fallout from Lex, who still hasn’t been found. It’s nothing more than the usual (she just has to talk about how generous Lillian and Lionel are for adopting her from a Muggle family), but the prospect is made all the more bitter by the world she is leaving.  
  
On her last night, Kara has another nightmare, and Lena crawls up beside her, as she has the last ten times. “Another one about your colony? Krypton, I mean.” Kara had finally told Lena a bit about her former home through a river of tears almost a week ago.  
  
“N-no. It was about you, this time.”  
  
Lena freezes, and presses her face into the pillow, blinking harshly, glad Kara is facing away from her. Of course. She should’ve know that Kara would end up afraid of her eventually.  
  
“Hey, no. No, Lena, not like that.” A thumb brushes delicately over her cheekbones, and it’s enough to coax Lena into looking up. “It’s just, you’re leaving, and Lex is still out there, and your parents suck, and there won’t be any Aurors like my dad around to protect you, and – and – how will I know you’re safe?”  
  
Lena just hugs her closer, because she can’t think of an answer that isn’t, _you won’t._

///

Somehow, August without Kara seems to last even longer than the last two summers put together. She isn’t sure what that means, so she locks it in the back of her mind to deconstruct later (later, she knows, really means _never_ ).

///

“A Muggle kid I met at the park told me all about this cool thing called _karate._ It’s fighting, like for a duel, but without magic or swords or anything. I’ve been getting really good, so if Lex shows up, I’ll totally kick his butt,” James grins at her, chucking her a chocolate frog from the pile in his lap.  
  
She rolls her eyes. “My hero,” she says sarcastically – they both know even the four of them together would be little more than paperweights to a wizard like Lex – but when she smiles at him, she means it. “But my brother has got bigger things to do than come after me, I imagine. Not to mention that he’s too scared of Professor Grant to ever try anything within a mile of Hogwarts.”  
  
The rain is hammering against the window, and they’re the only two in the compartment still awake. Kara, because, as Lena had learned when she stayed with the Danvers, the rhythm of falling rain knocks her out like a light. Winn, however, had stayed up far too late last night, cramming in as many hours on his gaming consoles as he could before he had to leave it all behind for Hogwarts.  
  
While Kara is curled up on the seat with her head on resting against Lena’s legs, the Ravenclaw has long since slid onto the floor, and is now unconsciously acting as James’ footrest.  
  
“So you are you going to tell me about this Lucy girl or what?” Lena smirks.

///

During the beginning of term feast, Lena catches sight of dozens of her fellow Slytherins wearing small silver badges. She asks the fourth year next to her about it, and he explains that these are the students whose parents have shown anti-Muggle sympathies in the past. He passes her one, and she realises that engraved on it are the words _Not With Lex_.

She feels a heady rush of pride for her house, for these kids who have grown up the same way she has, and are battling their way out of old fears and indoctrination. They’re the only students with something to prove – though the rest of is loathe Hogwarts to admit it, Slytherin students are more often than not on the wrong end of severe profiling – and she’s so glad that they’re trying, even with nothing to gain and a lot to lose.  
  
It doesn’t occur to her until much later that those who are wearing them have chosen to write _Lex_ instead of just _Luthor._ She wonders if maybe that was intentional.  
  
The next morning, someone has left one of the badges on the bedside table.  
  
She puts it on.

///

Lena takes to setting aside two hours on Sunday afternoons to help Alex (now a Prefect) prepare for her OWLs. She knows the eldest Danvers has tried to get Kara to help her, but despite her sister’s best efforts, everyone knows Kara’s who you call if you need a distraction, not a study buddy.  
  
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Alex tells her, as Lena shuffles the Transfiguration index cards, sifting through for a question she hasn’t answered yet.  
  
“You didn’t have to let me interrupt your summer,” Lena replies, and glances up to find Alex staring at her thoughtfully. “What?”  
  
“You’re really not used to people just being _nice_ to you, are you?”  
  
Lena rolls her eyes. “I’m a _Luthor_ , Alex. If I sat around waiting for people to be nice to me, I’d have mummified. Well, not so much anymore. I’ve got Kara, now. And Winn. James, too.”  
  
“And me,” Alex adds.  
  
Lena grins. “And you.” She’s not really sure how to thank Alex, to tell her what that means, so she just coughs and settles for switching to sarcasm. “But unless you’re trying to get an E in the non-existent friendship OWL, we should start.”  
  
Alex is pretty fluent in sarcasm, though, so Lena thinks she gets it.

///

“Aren’t you happy I bullied you into taking Care of Magical Creatures?” Kara asks cheerfully as she practically skips (Lena, of course, sticks to regular steps, like a normal, non-Kara person) down the hill to the edge of the forest for their introductory lesson.  
  
“Kara, poking someone repeatedly and pouting until they do as you ask isn’t _bullying_ ,” Lena explains, gently knocking her with her shoulder.  
  
Kara slips her arm through Lena’s elbow and they walk the rest of the way together.  
  
Their teacher, Professor M’orzz, in what is likely an effort to make the first class memorable, has brought a baby unicorn out for them to interact with.  
  
When she sees the look on Kara’s face as she catches sight of the creature, Lena thinks, yeah, she’s happy.

///

The first Hogsmeade weekend is unusually early in the term, which Lena is incredibly thankful for, given that it means their workloads are still too small for her to feel guilty over ditching study for a day.

Kara’s been saving money to spend at Honeydukes basically since birth, so the night before the trip, the Hufflepuff is too excited to sleep. Lena humours her enthusiasm, and the two stay up until the early morning in the common room, speculating on life at other wizarding schools, Muggle inventions, and a dozen other topics that Lena inevitably loses track of. It’s when Kara asks her what she wants to be when she grows up that she realises she doesn’t actually have an answer, at least not a specific one.  
  
What she really wants to be when she grows up is Lena Luthor, but to have that mean something, something important, that has nothing to do with being Lex’s sister.

///

In Hogsmeade, Kara consumes so much sugar that Winn and James agree she will probably spontaneously combust. Not that they are exactly innocent, either. James tries his best to convince the bar tender that he’s old enough for Fire Whiskey (he is, unsurprisingly, completely transparent, and is given a Butterbeer and told to come back in four years). Winn spends a small fortune at the Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes outlet, acquiring a great number of wet-start fireworks for god-knows-what. Lena feels like she’s herding cats, but it’s nice to take responsibility for something that isn’t bad.

Kara tags along with her back to the Slytherin dorms afterwards to chat, but rather predictably, ends up crashing spectacularly, falling asleep next to Caddy on Lena’s bed. The idea of sneaking an incredibly tired Kara back to the Hufflepuff rooms after curfew is not in the least bit tempting, so she just curls up beside her and drifts off as well.

///

On the eve of their first match of the season (Slytherin vs. Gryffindor), Lena decides to visit the pitch to squeeze in a little extra practice. When she heads into the training shed to change, though, she finds that the entirety of the rest of the team is already there.  
  
Once she’s got over her surprise that six teenage boys have skipped dinner, she demands, “What’s going on?”  
  
Her captain rubs the back of his neck, looking sheepish. “Well, look, Lena - okay, don’t be mad at us. It’s just, last year, when we played Gryffindor, you got wrecked. And we thought that, with Lex out and about these days, there might be a little more… _house rivalry_ than usual. So we were just making a defensive strategy. For, uh, you.”  
  
She raises an eyebrow. “I can look after myself, you know. Just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I’m made of glass.”  
  
The tallest beater, Donovan, looks a little pained. “We know that, Lena. Shit, in your first year, even, you took that bludger like a champ. But we’re a team. You’re our seeker. It’s kind of our whole job to make sure you can catch the snitch unscathed. We’ve just decided to be a little more… proactive, as it were. You’re pretty unlucky.”  
  
She thinks about her last name, and the howler that Lillian had sent her after a picture of Lena wearing one of the _Not With Lex_ badges had been leaked to the Daily Prophet; about nightmares and older brothers and a childhood spent as an accessory.

“Yeah,” she agrees. “Unlucky.”

///

None of the Gryffindors try anything. Not that she expected them to. But she thinks, perhaps, she plays better for knowing the team is looking out for her. And, of course, Kara’s endlessly cheerful and illuminating commentary makes Quidditch about ten times more amusing. She’s been permanently appointed commentator now, since the previous one graduated, and although Professor Grant makes a show of shaking her head every time Kara offers an off-topic observation, Lena knows for a fact she was the one who gave the youngest Danvers the positon.

///

“Hey! I _am_ coordinated. I can dance, you know.” Lena can see the regret on Winn’s face the second the words leave his mouth. She can’t help but laugh at the look on James’ face when he realises that his teasing about Winn’s Quidditch skills has unearthed an unexpected gem of information.  
  
“Like _ballroom_ dancing?” James asks, and she doesn’t think he was this gleeful even when Gryffindor won the Quidditch Cup last year.  
  
“Y-yes,” the Ravenclaw admits, staring at his shoes. While it is James’ self-appointed job to push Winn’s buttons, Lena decides to cut him some slack.  
  
“My mother made me learn, too,” she says, patting his leg in sympathy. While James is still cackling, now at the both of them, Kara has brightened up.  
  
“Ooh, show us,” she demands, sitting up straighter. “I bet it looks amazing.”  
  
After an embarrassingly short amount of time, the two of them cave, and manage a few turns with some of their dignity intact. They’re both decent at it, but given there’s no music and no occasion for it, they must look fairly ridiculous.  
  
“Teach me, please, Lena,” Kara begs, and suddenly, it doesn’t seem ridiculous anymore.

///

For someone so often awkward, Kara is surprisingly graceful, and quick to learn. After about an hour of practicing in the otherwise empty Slytherin dorm, it is actually Lena herself who is stumbling over the steps. Kara is standing very close, and Lena’s palm feels impossibly warm against her waist, and for some reason, all this, accompanied with the ever-present awareness of how pretty Kara is, is terribly distracting.

///

The first death threat arrives so late in the school year, she’s been lulled into a false sense of safety, sure that Lex has forgotten about her. It’s detailed and graphic, full of rants about her betrayal (apparently he’d seen the same photo of the _Not With Lex_ badge that her mother had), her impurity of blood, and how she’s a disgrace to the Luthor name. He describes the effects of the Crucio curse in horrifying detail, along with a whole host of other hexes and spells he’s honed for piquing fear and pain. The last line of the letter is this: _you’re not safe at Hogwarts._

After that, her sleep is so filled with nightmares that she gives up trying to rest, as if she’s kicking a bad addiction. She takes to roaming the castle, staying as far away from the dormitories as possible. If Lex does somehow break in to get to her, she wants to minimise the collateral damage.

Kara asks about the dark circles under her eyes. Lena tells her that she’s just up studying late, because she wants to take even more subjects next year.

///

“Where are we going?” Kara asks, but doesn’t resist as Lena pulls her down corridor after corridor.  
  
“Trust me, it’s worth skipping class for.” She feels light, elated – finding something this cool to show to Kara is the only good thing that’s happened to her in so long.  
  
Once they reach the statue on the third floor, Lena whispers, “Dissendium,” and the One Eyed Witch’s stone hump slides back to reveal the secret passageway.  
  
“Kara, I followed it. It leads to Honeydukes. Come on.”  
  
She tugs on the sleeve of Kara’s robes, but the other girl doesn’t move. “Lena, how did you find this?”  
  
Lena stiffens. “Umm…” Past experience says that she can’t lie to Kara, so she settles on an abbreviated version of the truth. “Well, sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I wander around a bit. I came across this a few nights ago, but I wanted to make sure it worked every time before I brought you.”  
  
Kara steps closer, and sweeps her thumbs over the bruises under Lena’s green eyes. “And how often can’t you sleep?”  
  
She shivers. “Come on, Kara, don’t you want to go to Honeydukes?”  
  
“No,” is the instant reply, and Kara’s eyes flare in the same way Alex’s do when she gets particularly protective over her baby sister. Lena marvels at the similarities between them, considering they’re not genetically related. “I want to know what’s going on with you. Please, tell me.”  
  
Lena slumps against the wall. “Kara…”  
  
“Just trust me, Lena. You’re my best friend. Nothing – _nothing_ – you can say is going to change that,” Kara tells her, reaching out and taking a hold of her hand. Lena doesn’t try to pull away, she can’t, Kara’s a magnet. “Alex told me once that you have a lot of trouble believing in people. I didn’t understand, when we were younger, because you’ve always had so much faith in me. That I can pass my exams, that I can be a good commentator, that I can bake cupcakes. But that’s not what she meant. You’re so used to people pushing you aside or away that you don’t even know how to think that they won’t.” Kara takes a deep breath; her eyes are fixed on Lena’s, and it makes her heart stumble. “I know I quit at chess and at learning to knit and at translating that French fairy tale you tell me when I can’t sleep, but I won’t quit at you, Lena. Okay? Do you believe me?”  
  
There is a long, quiet moment. The passageway slides back shut with a thud, but neither girl moves. Kara’s fingers tighten around Lena’s as the seconds tick by.  
  
“I believe you,” Lena says finally, and means it.  
  
“Good,” Kara smiles, brighter than Lena’s ever seen her, standing on her tip toes to kiss Lena gently on the forehead. She quickly looks down, hoping her hair hides the way her cheeks have suddenly, inexplicably, turned deep red. “So tell me what’s wrong.”

///

They go back to the Slytherin dorm rooms, and Lena shows her the letter, which she’s kept tucked under her pillow since it arrived three weeks ago. Kara reads it slowly, and even though she looks like she wants to cry, she doesn’t; Lena suspects that this is for her benefit.  
  
“I didn’t know what to do,” she explains. “I didn’t want anyone else to get hurt.”  
  
“Oh, Lena, why didn’t you go to a teacher?”  
  
She shrugs. “It says that I’m not safe at Hogwarts. I know a lot of people, including staff, hate the Luthors. I wasn’t sure if he just meant _not safe from him_.”  
Kara grips her hand so hard it hurts, but in a good way, in the best way. “We’re going to Professor Henshaw. He worked as an Auror with my dad. You can trust him.”

///

The Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher interviews Lena for almost an hour, grilling her about her memories of Lex, the letter, and anything else that might have happened to her this year. It’s giving Lena a headache, but Kara is pressed against her side, warm and sure and comforting, so the pounding in her temples doesn’t seem that bad.

///

In the final few weeks of term, a fleet of Aurors comes in to conduct an investigation into weaknesses in Hogwarts’ security. While it is supposedly a random check, Lena knows that Lex’s threats prompted it. A dozen Ministry workers come to talk to her, scrabbling for any evidence that might help them locate her brother, and their constant questions in harsh, accusing tones leave her more tired than those sleepless nights. The weariness always dissipates, though, when she leaves the interrogations to find Kara waiting outside in the hall, every time without fail, usually accompanied by Winn, James, Alex or even all three.

///

“Come stay with us again this summer,” Kara pipes up from where she’s draped over the top of Lena’s trunk, eyes closed as she listens to Lena collecting her various possessions from where they have scattered themselves around the dorm over the year.  
  
“My parents -”  
  
“Let you come last time,” the blonde reminds her.  
  
“Your parents -”  
  
“Would love to have you back.”  
  
“I guess… Maybe if I promise to come back for any press or Lex stuff, and remind them how nice it was not to have me around…” Lena begins, already calculating her odds.  
  
“I wish you wouldn’t say things like that, Lena,” Kara says. “Your parents suck, not you. They should miss you whenever you go away, and wish you would come back. I know I do.”  
  
Lena allows herself a grin and sits down on the floor, letting her head drop back to lean against Kara’s stomach. She can feel the rise and fall of Kara’s every breath, and it’s peaceful. As she does every time the summer threatens to arrive, Lena wishes that she didn’t have to leave; instead, she wants to stay frozen in this moment in time with Kara for the next three months, until the school year starts again.  
  
“I’m working on it. On believing in people, like you said. In myself, too. But I guess it’s hard to change the way you’ve been taught to think for your whole life,” Lena mumbles, her eyes closed, lulled by the barely-audible echoes of Kara’s heartbeat.  
  
“I wish you could see you the way I see you,” is the reply.

///

The train ride home is always a little melancholy. Despite her plan to get her parents to let her visit Kara over the summer, a large part of Lena knows that this is likely the last time she will see any of her friends for the next three months. Kara is cheerful, talking about her coming to stay as if it is a certainty, and Winn is something of an enabler, chiming in with plans to introduce them both to video games. She can’t bear the idea of bringing their high spirits down at all, so she plays along. Only James – James, whose father died in the last wizarding war, who not only tries to understand but really _knows_ that not every problem can be solved by trying your very best – seems to share in her uncertainty. Just before they all have to disembark, he subtly slips her an envelope.  
  
She opens it quickly. Inside is a photo of the four of them that Alex took with James’ father’s old wizarding camera, on the day they finished their exams. They’re on the shore of the lake, relaxing, as has become their end-of-year tradition. In the picture, James and Winn are engaged in some kind of struggle that seems to be half-headlock, half-hug, and Kara is settled happily in Lena’s lap, leaning back against her chest. They all look so cheerful and bright and young that it makes her heart ache, mostly in a good way.  
  
“In case you don’t get to see them before September,” he murmurs so the other two don’t hear, and hugs her tight. He’s grown so much over the last year that he’s more than a full head taller than her, and her cheek rests against his chest.  
  
“If you keep sprouting up like this, Olsen, they’ll _have_ to make you Keeper. You’ll be able to block all three hoops at once,” she mumbles into his shirt, and Kara must overhear from where she’s standing beside them, because both she and James start to laugh.  
  
Lena wishes she could put that sound in the envelope, too.

 


	4. the fourth year

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a little angstier. The slow burn is becoming less slow. Also, Sanvers!
> 
> To everyone who has left a comment, thank you, they mean so much to me. I put a lot of time into this story, and knowing that it interests people, or means something to them, makes me want to write more. So 1000x thank you.
> 
> NOTE: this is a fairly risky chapter, so if you hate it, let me know, and I'll take another run up at 4th year. Let me be clear also that in terms of the end of the chapter, I am not trying to address the concept of suicide. I've lived through depression, and that's not something I really want to revisit in my writing, so it's an allusion only. That being said, it's all in context, and none of the characters end up in that kind of mental place, so don't worry.

For once, Lena’s summer doesn’t start quietly. Lex doesn’t waste any time in tilting her world on its axis again, and by the end of the week, she’s throwing three or four threatening letters on the fire every day.

She takes to flinching at loud noises, checking over her shoulder, and staring at the ceiling instead of sleeping at night. Lena knows she’s probably being paranoid; after all, Lex hadn’t followed through on the promises he’d sent her during the school term. But the distinct feeling that he has the home field advantage as long as she’s at the Luthor house lingers perpetually at the forefront of her mind, and now she’s simply waiting for everything to implode.

///

  
Lillian waves off the letters as Lex “working off some steam” and “a little sibling tension”, but then the Daily Prophet catches wind of it, and publishes an article about Lex Luthor no longer only targeting Muggles, and that’s when Aurors start to show up.  
  
When she was younger, Lena knows she would’ve lied to them. Told them she was okay, she felt secure, and did they have any more questions? But these days, Kara’s voice whispers in her ear, telling her to just _believe_ , and run in head first, blindly hoping that there are adults who think she is worth helping. So she answers all their questions honestly. Yes, she thinks the threats are legitimate; no, she doesn’t feel safe where she is. Their clinical style of investigation makes her just as uncomfortable as it did at Hogwarts, though, and this time, her friends are not waiting outside the room for her.  
  
A few days after the last of the interviews, Jeremiah Danvers shows up to talk to her. His beard is a little thicker than it was when she visited them last year, but his eyes still crinkle in the same kind way when he smiles, and for the first time in forever, she doesn’t feel like she has to be on guard around an adult.  
  
“So, Lena, the other Aurors who were here earlier this week made the official recommendation that you be moved to a more protected location. They wanted to take you to one of the Ministry’s concealed houses, but I offered for you to come stay with us. Because of my line of work, our place already has every shielding spell in the book on it, so it’s just as safe. I figured you might feel better if you weren’t around total strangers, and I happen to know that Kara misses you, and would love to see you again. So what do you think about that?”  
  
Lena eyes him carefully for a moment. He’s never lied to her, but she’s still cautious. “For real?”  
  
He nods, and claps a comforting hand on her shoulder. “For real, Lena. We’d love to have you. Is that a yes?”  
  
She probably nods a few too many times, but she can’t help it, not when it’s as if a thousand pounds is sliding off her back and her stomach is already bubbling with anticipation at the promise of getting to spend time with Kara. “What are you going to tell my mother? She… she can be…” She’s sure if she tells Mr Danvers that Lillian disapproves of his half-blood heritage (and that she was only permitted to stay with them last time because her mother hadn’t paid attention to where she went), he will get angry with her.  
  
“How about we just leave it as you going to a Ministry safe house? We did technically register as one,” he tells her. She wonders what Alex and Kara must have said to him, for him to not question her discomfort around her mother. With that, he disappears into the living room to talk it over with her parents.    
  
Lena waits outside on tenterhooks, wishing she had an Extendable Ear from the Weasley joke shop so that she could find out whether Lillian is being persuaded. It’s almost a quarter of an hour before her mother exits the room, gives her a frosty smile (which is really just a masquerading grimace), and commands her to go pack.  
  
She waits until she’s sure her parents cannot see her, and then lets her face break out in a wide and unrestrained smile.

///

The next morning, before they Aparate away, Mr Danvers offers to give Lillian the address Lena will be staying at, so they can stay in contact via owl.  
  
“I feel that she would perhaps be safer if the location were to remain entirely a secret,” her mother declares, voice sharp and scathing as she turns Jeremiah down.  
  
Lena hears what she really says; that she is confident that she will not wonder about the well-being of her daughter at all. It stings a bit, but – she thinks of the Danvers’ house by the beach, of afternoons playing Quidditch and learning how to swim, of _Kara_ , and yeah, that sting isn’t nearly as painful as it used to be.

So she offers her mother goodbye in the form of a stilted handshake, unable to properly read the look on Mr Danvers’ face as he observes the exchange. For a while it could almost pass for pity, but then for anger, and she decides she doesn’t really want to decipher it.

Not three minutes later, they are disappearing into thin air, leaving the Luthor mansion behind, and even though the vacuum pressures of Aparating squeeze her lungs, she feels like she can breathe again.

///

Kara squeals when they arrive, pulling her into a tight hug the second she materialises, and even though she gently whispers, “It’s only been a week, Kara,” into her hair, she is arguably holding the other girl just as tightly.  
  
“It’s been a really long week,” is the reply.  
  
Mr Danvers makes some kind of joke about boarding school getting them too used to seeing each other every day, but Lena doesn’t really hear him.

///

Alex has gone to stay with Maggie for the first three weeks of the summer, and the ensuing boredom of being left alone has prompted Kara to redecorate her entire room, apparently several times. On one wall is now a string of pictures; a lot are of her family (sometimes all of them together, but mostly just her and Alex at varying ages), a few are of Clark, and then the rest are all snapshots from school, and Lena, to her surprise, is in all but one of these. Kara catches her staring at the little gallery, watching the figures move about within their frames, and points to the one hanging in the middle of the string.  
  
“That’s my favourite,” she says, unpegging it and handing it to Lena. It’s of the three of them, she, Alex and Kara, and she thinks she remembers it being taken, just after the Quidditch match between Slytherin and Gryffindor last year. They’d lost – even though she’d caught the snitch – but in the photo she’s grinning anyway, because it had been impossible to feel too bad after listening to Kara’s rather imaginative commentary for an hour. Alex appears extremely pleased with herself, her robes spattered with mud and the quaffle balanced on her fingertips. She can’t help but notice that even though their photographic selves spend most of the time looking at the camera, the gaze of this colour-and-ink version of Lena drifts to Kara perhaps a few times too often.  
  
Before she can think too hard about that, though, they are interrupted, Caddy streaking past their feet, hotly pursued by an inexplicably incensed Wiggles.

///

Later, when they’re sitting out on the beach, watching the sun set, Kara finally cracks, bringing up the topic Lena’s seen sitting behind her eyes all day, begging to be voiced. “We need to talk about Lex.”  
  
Lena picks up a handful of sand, lets it sift between her knuckles. “Or we could _not_ do that.”  
  
Kara sighs, and reaches out for her, tangling their fingers together. “I know you like to ignore it all, Lena, but it’s not good for you. At school, you tried to bottle it all up, and it just made you a sad insomniac. Can we _please_ talk about it?”  
  
“A sad insomniac?” Lena mutters, raising her eyebrows.  
  
Kara offers a lopsided grin. “My absolute favourite sad insomniac?” Her expression quickly returns serious, though, so Lena knows she’s not about to get out of this discussion.  
  
She sighs. “I’ve kind of numbed to it all, I guess. There’s only so many ways you can threaten to hurt someone before it all becomes just words. I – I think the most stupid thing is that I hate that he hates me. I mean, he’s evil, so I shouldn’t care, but… He’s still my brother. My _brother_ hates me. The same one who hugged me and taught me Quidditch and helped me with maths.” Lena’s eyes start to sting, and she presses her palms into them, ashamed. She feels Kara’s arm wind around her back and pull her close, her fingers tracing softly up and down Lena’s ribs like piano keys. She’s spent what seems like a millennia trying to pinpoint what’s really bothering her, but with Kara holding her, the sentences aren’t that elusive anymore. “It just – I just feel like if he can start hating me – the first person who ever really liked me… loved me, even – then what’s to stop everyone else? What if everything at school and at home isn’t to do with being a Luthor at all, what if it’s me? What if I’m just… hateable?” She folds her knees up against her chest and stares out at the sea, pretending that there aren’t tears sliding down her cheeks and hoping that Kara will pretend with her.  
  
Kara is silent for a long time, and every second that ticks by makes Lena’s lungs constrict further. Then she says, “I finally finished translating that French fairy tale you tell me. You know, when I can’t sleep? I tried reading it over once, when I had a nightmare. I thought it would make me feel better.”  
  
“Did it?” Lena asks, picking at the tears in her jeans. She’s pressed so closely to Kara that she doesn’t even have to turn to see that the other girl is shaking her head.  
  
“No. Not even when I tried the original. It’s not the story that helps, Lena, it’s you. It’s how you hug me till I stop crying, or say bad jokes till I laugh, or tell me about things people used to think were impossible until I feel like I could do anything. But even if you and I had never met on the train, and all those moments never existed, I would still think you’re amazing, Lena, because how good you are has nothing to do with how you good you are to me. You’re kind and funny and smart and all of those things people spend their whole lives trying to be. I love you, and Alex loves you, and so do Winn and James. I’m going to keep reminding you of that until you remember it every day all on your own, because you’re my best friend, and you deserve to be so happy, and you are so far from hateable, Lena. So far.”  
  
The words settle deep within her in a warm sort of way, that bubbly feeling she always gets around Kara mixed with something else, something she can’t quite describe. It’s like happiness, but more three-dimensional. She thinks that maybe she feels _loved._  
  
They don’t move or say anything else for what seems like eons; it’s just the two of them under the sky. As Lena watches the stars tentatively creep into existence, she imagines her heart as a leaking boat, but for the first time, the cracks are being sealed up fast enough to stop it from sinking.

///

Lena is awoken exactly one minute into her fourteenth birthday by a gentle tapping on her face. Her eyes flicker open, and she can make out the shadow of Kara in the darkness. The blonde leaning over her in such a way that when Lena sits up, Kara is practically in her lap, and she should be wondering why they’re awake in the middle of the night, but for some reason she is finding it hard to focus on anything but _that._  
  
“Lena,” she whispers, leaning across to turn on a small lamp, “happy birthday.”  
  
She grins, blinking a little in the new glow. “Thanks, Kara. But it’s not that big of a deal, you know. It could’ve waited till morning.”  
  
“But no one ever makes a big deal out of your birthday. So I decided I was going to. Midnight presents and all,” Kara informs her, and that’s when Lena realises that she’s holding a rather creatively wrapped package. They’re too close for Lena to really get the room she needs to open it, so it takes about twice as long as it ought  
to battle through the tape, but she wouldn’t ask Kara to move for anything.  
  
Inside is a photo album, barely bigger than a pack of cards and bound in plain leather. Every single page is filled, many of the photos with her in them, but some with the others by themselves: Winn, James, Alex, Maggie and Kara, with dozens of other classmates flitting in and out; all the people she misses over the summer when she is alone.  
  
None of the clinically-chosen, professionally-wrapped gifts her family occasionally give her can hold a candle to something like this. “Kara, this is the best birthday present I’ve ever got,” she says, and she means it, she does, but when Kara kisses her on the cheek, a small voice in her head whispers, _no, that_ _is._

///

The Danvers’ home seems to be enchanted in such a way that time passes about seven times faster there than it does at Lena’s house. While the days barely manage to drag themselves by in the Luthor mansion, five or six disappear at once when she’s hanging out with Kara. One moment, it’s Monday morning, and they’re looking at Kara’s art, and the next, they’re playing wizarding Monopoly on Friday night. 

///

Alex returns home from Maggie’s two days earlier than expected. Lena can’t tell if she’s angry, confused or sad, but she storms into her room in such a way that even Kara decides to give her an hour or so to simmer before going to see what is wrong. Later, all Kara’s discussion with her yields is that Alex probably has some things that she “really needs to think over”, and that she and Maggie currently aren’t talking.  
  
Lena wishes she could help her somehow, like Alex has helped her over the years, but she’s never learned how to comfort anyone but Kara. In the end, she settles for telling her, “If you need to talk to someone who isn’t family, or someone to yell at, I’m here.”  
  
Alex gives her a sharp nod, and she thinks she’s done all right.

///

While the eldest Danvers daughter elects not to share whatever it is about Maggie that’s bothering her, she does eventually cave to joining in on Kara and Lena’s many activities. Lena suspects this is more an avoidance strategy than anything, but she remembers the various, complicated thoughts about Kara that she’s locked away over the years, and never pulls Alex up on it.

///

Under the Daily Prophet’s headline about the Chudley Cannons’ rather impressive losing streak is a smaller article, entitled _Lionel Luthor, of the famous Pureblood line & father of Azkaban escapee Lex Luthor, Dies of Natural Causes, Aged 67. _After reading it, Lena quietly abandons her toast and walks slowly back up the stairs to Kara’s room.

She can hear someone calling after her, but the sound reverberates through her without any discernible meaning at all. She goes and stands by the open window, closing her eyes and focusing on the way the breeze dances across her face. Lena doesn’t feel like crying, doesn’t feel like anything; just leans her head against the wall and allows the numbness to spread through her like a virus, shutting down her internal organs one by one.  
  
The door clicks shut behind Kara. “My father’s dead,” Lena mumbles, without preamble. Kara must surely say something back, but she can’t make it out over the thunder in her ears. But then arms are folding around her and she presses her face into Kara’s shoulder. There are the words “hold on tight”, so she does, and it’s followed by a disorientating, rushing sensation (but it’s not that different to what she usually feels with Kara, so she barely pays attention). When she finally looks up from the crook of Kara’s neck – which might be a decade later or a few seconds, she can’t tell – they’re on the roof.  
  
Lena wants to comment on how good Kara’s flying is getting, and how proud she is that Kara’s been able to hang on to such a good thing from the past, but her throat isn’t working properly.  
  
“I would’ve flown us to the beach, because I know you love it there, but I can’t really fly with other people yet.” There is a pause, which Lena doesn’t manage to fill.  
“Do you want to cry?” Kara prompts. “It’s okay to. Even if you’re not sure how you felt about him.”  
  
Lena drags a hand through her hair, so savagely that it’s painful. “Why does no one tell me? Why do I always have to _find out_ things about my family?” She sighs. “He did a lot of bad things. Mostly not to me. He just let bad things happen to me, which isn’t all that different, I guess. But… I think I loved him,” she admits. “Or, at least, I wanted him to love me so badly that it almost felt like the same thing.”

///

When Lena goes home for the funeral, she stays there. Even Lex’s activity has ceased in the wake of his father’s death, and she has no real excuse to return to the Danvers’.  
  
The house seems no more or less empty, but she does miss him, misses the idea of a father, misses it not just being her and her mother trapped within the Luthor mansion walls.  
  
A few days before she is due to return to Hogwarts, a locket arrives in the mail, bearing a note that says _Lionel gave this to me once. It only feels right that it be returned to you now._ The necklace tiny and tasteful and beautiful, with a delicate _L_ engraved on the front, and while she cannot quite bring herself to put it on (she imagines that it would be far, far too heavy), she does slip it into her pocket. It reminds her of Lionel in a quiet way, and a tangible means of remembering him lifts the fear of forgetting him from the back of her mind.

///

One hand holding Kara’s and the other tugging her trolley, Lena guides them through the press of the crowd at Platform 9¾ as it ebbs and flows like a river bursting its banks. Suddenly, a tiny, raven-haired girl bursts out of nowhere and runs headlong into Lena, the impact knocking her back a step or two.  
  
Lena guesses she must be a first year, judging by her size, and their similarities in physical appearance, not to mention the slight scowl and fierce look on the kid’s face, throws her right back to her first time on the train, three years ago. The memory of how lonely and dark and futile everything had seemed hits her harder than the girl did. While there are still moments when Lena is sure she is suffocating, they are much fewer and further between these days. She is not oblivious to the reason for such changes, and holds a little tighter to Kara’s hand after that.  

///

Classes are harder than ever, and Lena _loves_ it. She responds well to the stress of the new workload, and has added a few new subjects to her timetable to round out whatever little spare time she has. She cannot help but draw connections and see potential between the technology they discuss in Muggle Studies, and the enchantments she is taught in her other lessons. Magic and science. Something about how the two could interlock just _makes sense_ in her head, and soon, the margins of her notebooks are filled with ideas for hybrid adaptions of cell phones, microscopes and forensic tools.  
  
Winn takes a look at them. “These are good, Lena. Really good. You might be onto something.” He grins at her, and she thinks maybe he’s proud of her. It’s a new concept, a warm one, that makes her feel ten times bigger than she actually is.

///

Lex’s letters continue to arrive with the owl post in the mornings. She doesn’t bother to read them anymore, just mutters, _incendio_ , and tries to forget.

///

After her first Defence Against the Dark Arts class of the year, Professor Henshaw pulls her aside. “With all this business with Lex and his letters, I want you to take some extra tutorials with me. It’s extremely unlikely he’d ever even _try_ anything while you’re at Hogwarts, but I think it’s best to be prepared.”  
  
When she tells the boys about it, both Winn and James insist on coming along to the tutorials (“We want to have your back, Lena.”). Kara arrives at the end of their conversation, and after she – inevitably – decides to come, too, she invites Alex, who drags Sawyer along (possibly as a sign of good will in their tentatively repairing friendship), who asks Vasquez, who brings Donovan, who comes accompanied by three friends from sixth year.  
  
Kara suggests they start an official club, which earns eye rolls from everyone, including Henshaw.  
  
But, because it’s Kara – it’s _Kara_ – a week later, they’re a club. They call themselves the DEO (Alex’s suggestion; an acronym for Defence Extension Organisation), and meet once a week to practice defensive magic.

///

Eventually, her ideas escape the margins of her notes into a book of their very own, which quickly begins to fill with dozens and dozens of diagrams. In it, she sees the possibility to make something, to become something, to be good and useful. It makes her wonder about _Luthor_ , the name that’s been an anchor for so long, dragging her down. She wants to change that, wants to push her family – and herself – out of Lex’s shadow.  So she takes her father’s old necklace out of her pocket and slips it around her neck, under her robes, and lets the feeling of it resting against her skin serve as a reminder of the name she hopes to save.

///

Lena is hovering high above the game, watching the progression of the play out of the corner of her eye, but mostly focussed on scanning for the snitch. Well, that, and Kara’s voice as it echoes around the pitch.  
  
“… Donovan’s got his bat up and ready, and he _slams_ that bludger… Oh, no, it’s headed for Alex – _why_ would you aim it for _Alex_ , Donovan, she’s your _friend_ …” – luckily, Alex has the good sense to duck, and the ball hums harmlessly by – “Slytherin in possession, and… That’s another ten points to Slytherin, way to go guys! Don’t give me that look, Alex, Professor Grant says I have to be unbiased.” Lena has no idea how she can see the eldest Danvers’ expression over all the distance between them, but figures it must be a sister thing, where Kara doesn’t have to _see,_ she just _knows._  
  
James is the reserve Keeper, now, and she crosses her fingers that the current Gryffindor one will let another goal through, forcing Alex to bench him and give James a shot.  
  
Twenty points to Slytherin later, her friend is up in front of the hoops, and he doesn’t let a single goal through. Lena should be mad that they’re losing their lead, but instead she’s just proud.

///

There’s a knock on the Slytherin dorm door.  
  
All of the room’s occupants look up, confused. Most of the girls meet their friends elsewhere in the castle, and Kara, their most frequent visitor, never knocks, which they’re all used to by now.  
  
Lena opens the door to find a rather nervous-looking Alex on the other side. “Can we talk?” She looks up, eyeing the other girls. “Alone?”  
  
When they’ve found a broom cupboard out in the corridor that Alex deems sufficiently secure, she says, without introduction, “I kissed Maggie. After we won.”  
  
Lena tries to keep her shock from showing on her face. It’s not that she’s surprised that Alex _wanted_ to kiss Maggie (she’s been hanging around them for years, and she likes to think she’s a little less oblivious than Kara), but that Alex actually _did.  
  
_ “Is this related to that big fight you had over the summer?”  
  
Alex shrugs. “Kind of. I think, back then, I started a row over nothing so I wouldn’t have to deal with… everything.”  
  
“Did she kiss you back?” Lena enquires delicately, because Alex doesn’t look nearly so happy as she perhaps ought to.  
  
She watches Alex’s fists clench white by her sides. “No,” she sighs. “She says I’m just _figuring things out_. And that she’s my friend.”  
  
Lena frowns sympathetically. “Ouch. That sucks.”  
  
The other girl nods a few too many times, so vigorously that Lena knows it’s in an attempt not to cry. “And I know I need to tell Kara. About me. About Maggie. About how I think I’m…” she trails off. “But I wanted to practice. With you. Because Kara’s the most important person in my life, and I can’t mess it up with her. But I think you understand what it’s like to be afraid of losing people, and to have something about yourself you can’t control that just… twists you up inside.”

Lena knows Alex means all the trauma that her last name has brought, but that voice in the back of her brain that she’s hushed for so long (because Kara’s her friend, her best friend, the only person that she physically _couldn’t lose_ ) starts to whisper that maybe she and Alex aren’t as dissimilar as they think.  
  
“I do,” Lena promises.

///

Lena wasn’t present for it, but apparently, Alex’s talk with Kara involved a lot of crying, hugging, and Kara threatening to cast an array of largely harmless (but not _that_ harmless) hexes on Maggie, an offer which Alex politely declines.  
  
“How could she not want Alex? Alex is amazing. Ask anyone,” Kara grumbles, glaring fiercely at nothing while she pats Caddy (who, as he hasn’t grown in nearly four years, they have long since concluded is cursed).  
  
Lena is silent. Kara’s not in the mood to empathise with Maggie right now, but all Lena can think is she can understand wanting someone, but also being sure that if they slow down for a moment, they’ll realise you’re not what _they_ want at all.

///

The first time she sleepwalks, she doesn’t get very far. Her hand is just barely resting on the doorknob of their room’s door when she starts awake. It’s disorienting, but not entirely unfamiliar: when she was first adopted by the Luthors, she knows she used to do this occasionally.  
  
The second time, she awakes in the common room. The third, she makes it out of the Slytherin dungeons, and, she realises, with some confusion, halfway to the Astronomy Tower. She’s not doing quite as well as some of her friends in that class (Kara has a natural affinity for the cosmos), and wonders if this is some kind of manifestation of stress.  
  
She ends up asking one of the other girls in the dorm, Jess, to cast a binding spell on her every evening before they all go to sleep.

///

Some nights, they sneak down to the courtyard so Kara can practice flying. She’s getting really good, able to go further and further, often managing more than thirty feet above the ground.

Ostensibly, Lena goes with her in case she crashes, but really, it’s mostly to enjoy the way Kara’s eyes light up as she hovers just out of gravity’s reach, a little closer to all those stars she loves so much.

Sometimes, Lena takes her broom, so they can fly together.

Those nights are her favourite.

///

“I asked Lucy out!” James announces so loudly at lunch one day that at least three other students they don’t know turn and stare at them with interest.  
  
“And?” Kara presses, smiling at him.  
  
“She said yes! We’re going to that place in Hogsmeade next trip,” he tells them smugly, and they all let him have his moment, choosing not to remind him that it took him three weeks to even get the courage to say _hi_ to her.

///

“Which famous figure helped achieve the dente between the Scottish vampire and wizarding clans in 1351?” Lena asks, flipping the index card over so Kara can’t see the answer from where she sits behind her.  
  
“Um…” Kara hums as she drags the brush through Lena’s hair. She’s found that Kara studies best if they multitask to stave off the boredom, and today, it is the promise of experimenting with hair styles that has lured her into revising for History of Magic. “Was is Calista de Reign?”  
  
“Close. Her name is Calista de Ren. You know they’ll mark you down if you spell it wrong,” Lena says, patting Kara’s shin in consolation (it’s the only part of her friend she can reach in their current position).

///

Of all the students in the DEO, Lena is perhaps having the most difficulty producing a Patronus.

Kara had managed to produce a fully formed one on only her sixth try, and her giant silvery Labrador is currently bounding around the classroom, happily chasing its own tail.

Every time Lena tries to find a happy memory to focus on, though, dark things creep in from the outskirts of her mind (Lex’s voice, Lillian’s eyes, the suffocating walls of the Luthor mansion) and all she conjures is metallic smoke.  
  
Kara comes up beside her, and throws an arm around Lena’s waist. “Still having trouble, huh?” she asks, sympathetically.  
  
With the blonde’s head resting on her shoulder, the magic doesn’t seem quite so far out of reach. The next “Expecto Patronum!” yields a small, fluttering baby phoenix. It’s a little uncoordinated at first, but soon the shadowy bird is spiralling around above them. She doesn’t know much about phoenixes. Just that they are born from ashes.  
  
“Oh, cool! Yours flies,” Kara observes happily.  
  
_Like you_ , Lena thinks.

///

Kara throws herself down on Lena’s bed, glaring at the ceiling. “I can’t _believe_ all the snow is gone! It feels like Christmas was yesterday. I didn’t get to have nearly enough snowball fights with Winn.”  
  
With a flick of her wand and a few whispered words, tiny white flakes form in thin air and tumble down onto her friend. Kara squeaks at the cold, then giggles.  
  
“All better?” Lena asks, laughing a little, too.

///

While she’s studying her Herbology textbook, Lena comes across a plant called the Saviour Vine.

The way the author describes it is this: _also known as Nature’s Healer, this climber [fig. 3.11] has an incredible strength (of magical origin) that makes it a sought-after material in agriculture and alchemy. In the wild, it wraps around trees and shrubs with rotting roots tightly enough to prevent them from falling, and its support gives these plants a chance to grow again. It must be noted, however, that even with the assistance of the Saviour Vine, if the tree does not put down new roots of its own among the decaying ones, it will die anyway. The species is credited with saving much of the habitat of the Bowtruckle._

The inset picture is of a small, blackened sapling, its trunk neatly wound with a thin, green vine covered in delicate pink flowers.

  
Lena ends up staring at the page for a long, long time, because the information there seems capital ‘s’ Significant, somehow.

///

One DEO meeting, Henshaw takes them each separately into a broom cupboard to face a boggart. Most of the kids return pale and shaky, and often leave right after, transparently claiming forgotten homework or plans with friends.  
  
When Maggie comes back from her encounter with the creature, she stalks right up to Alex, grabs her by the wrist, and drags her out of the classroom, claiming she needs to talk to her.  
  
“One galleon says that they’re gonna go make out,” Donovan offers. No one is willing to bet against him.  
  
Kara returns from her go with the boggart looking like she’s been hollowed out, and walks straight into Lena’s arms, burying her face in the crook of her neck. Lena can hear her mumbling, _all of them, all burning, all over again.  
_  
“Lena,” Professor Henshaw calls, motioning for her to take her turn. She leaves a still-crying Kara leaning against the desk for a moment, pacing over to him.  
  
“I’m skipping. I’m going to take her back to her dorm,” she tells him.  
  
He stares her down. “It will only be a few minutes, Lena. This club started because of you and Lex, remember? This is important.” At the thought of her family, the locket on her chest seems to grow heavier.  
  
Lena shrugs. “Not as important as she is. I’ll practice another time.”  
  
Henshaw gazes at her for a long moment, before nodding slowly. “I understand,” he says, in such a tone that makes her think he really does, perhaps even more than she meant for him to.

///

After the boggart, Kara has more and more nightmares. She tries a sleeping draught from the matron, but that only leaves her trapped inside the dreams, unable to wake and claw her way back to reality.  
  
“How about I come sleep next to you for a bit, okay? That always helped over the summer,” Lena offers.  
  
Kara’s eyes are glazed over with exhaustion, and her usually bright and energetic demeanour has lessened. “Okay.”

///

When she stays in Kara’s dorm, Lena doesn’t ask anyone to cast the binding curse on her, lest she be unable to help her friend during the night. It means she sleepwalks sometimes, but she thinks that occasionally waking up on the stairs of the Astronomy Tower is worth it if it means Kara gets some rest.

///

 _Next step. Next step. Next step.  
_  
Lena fights for consciousness. She’s almost sure she can hear someone calling her name, but the words are blurred by the lulling layers of sleep that are wrapped around her mind. She feels like she’s moving upwards, quickly, but the soft, tired voice of reason argues that it’s all part of her dream. She’s somehow even more exhausted than she was when she curled up next to Kara at curfew, and her body begs for stillness, but dream says, _next step, next step, next step._ Something around her throat is tugging forward, digging into the skin of her neck.  
  
“LENA! Lena, stop!”  
  
That’s Kara’s voice. Her best friend, who is probably having a terrible nightmare, and needs her to wake up. She’s eased into awareness by the cold air blowing through her hair, and dancing across her face. Her eyes flicker open.  
  
The first thing she sees is Kara. Kara, expression full of shock and fear. Kara, reaching out for her. Kara, blonde locks tangling around her face as she screams Lena’s name.  
  
The second thing she notices is that they’re in the Astronomy Tower, right at the very top. Kara is still only just at the top of the staircase, but she’s moving forward quickly, towards Lena, and that’s when she realises that she’s standing right next to the giant window they used to point their telescopes through to study the stars.  
  
It’s open.  
  
“Lena, you’ve got to step back, or you’re going to fall over the edge,” Kara begs.  
  
“Kara -” That’s when the locket jerks forward violently, as if being drawn to some invisible magnet in the sky. It’s enough to unbalance Lena entirely, snapping her head forward, and she tilts dangerously for a second, before gravity does what gravity does best – it _pulls._  
  
She falls.  
  
It seems to happen both gradually and impossibly fast. Her hair whips about her face, and she’s tumbling down, down, _down,_ just like she has been for her entire life.  
  
As far as last words go, she thinks, she’s happy with hers.

 

Suddenly, arms wrap tightly around her, and she’s slowing down. Through the wind and the tears that blur her gaze, she can just make out the look of intense concentration on Kara’s face as she tries to fly both of them. She’s never attempted to go this high, or this fast, much less with Lena as well.  
  
It takes a second for it to register, but Lena realises that Kara must have _jumped off the edge after her._ Lena wonders if Kara had to ask to be in Hufflepuff; it’s moments like this when she sees so much Gryffindor in her.  
  
At their speed, they will not be okay on impact. But they will not die.  
  
The ground is rushing up below them, and Lena twists them at the last second, so that Kara will land on her instead of the rocks. They slam _hard_ into the earth, so hard that Lena can hear her leg break, and her wrist as well. The force of it separates the two of them.  
  
She grits her teeth against the pain. “Kara? Kara, are you okay?”  
  
“I’m fine, I think,” comes the muffled reply as the blonde manages to push herself up into a sitting position on the grass.  
  
Lena stares at her carefully, making absolutely sure that what she’s saying is true. She can see the white of her shin bone in her peripheral vision, but she knows she’ll be sick if she looks, so she doesn’t. “Kara, you’re an idiot! I can’t believe you did that. You can’t _fly_ with two people yet! You could’ve _died._ ”  
  
“Well you _would’ve_ died, if I hadn’t!” Kara yells back, just as fiercely.  
  
Lena draws in a deep breath to shout something back – she’s not sure what it will be, she just knows that she’s so _angry_ that Kara put herself in danger, just for her – but they’re interrupted by the sharp voice of Professor Grant.  
  
“Exactly what is going on here?” she demands as she stalks across the grounds towards where they lie. “I had a Gryffindor prefect on patrol come tell me that they were _sure_ they saw a figure fall off the Astronomy Tower. Which should not be possible.”  
  
That’s when Lena notices Alex running after her, except she doesn’t halt in front of them like the Professor does, but instead sprints right through to Kara, gathering her sister up in her arms.  
  
“Perhaps my earlier question was too verbose. What. Happened?”  
  
The shock is starting to wear off, and the pain from Lena’s leg is so dizzying that she’s sure she’s about to pass out. “I – I don’t know,” she sighs, before the black ink at the edges of her vision swallows her whole.

///

Lena can’t seem to make her eyes work, but apparently her ears have started to function again. She’s being assaulted by a whirlwind of noise that, after a minute of trying to coax her brain into functioning, she eventually realises is words.  
  
“… and she was gone, so I went to look for her.”  
  
“If I might interrupt, Miss Danvers, exactly what is Miss Luthor doing in the Hufflepuff dormitories if she is, in fact, one of my Slytherins?”  
  
“Ah…”  
  
“Kara has nightmares, sometimes, Professor,” adds a new voice. “I know Lena helps her get through them if I can’t.”  
  
“Yes! So then I woke up, and she wasn’t there, so I get up, right? And I saw her down the very end of the corridor, and she was walking really weirdly, so I figured she might still be asleep. But Alex told me once that you shouldn’t wake sleepwalking people, so I just followed her.”  
  
“To the Astronomy Tower?”  
  
“Yeah. And I figured that was _not_ good, right? So I sped up, but she was going really fast up the stairs, like she was being pulled, and I couldn’t catch up. By the time I got to the top, she was standing right next to the big window, you know the one? And I yelled at her to step back, and that’s when she woke up.” This is all said very hurriedly, as if the words are racing each other on their way to be heard. “I saw her eyes open, and she looked at me. And then she tipped forward, and I saw that the necklace – yeah, that one, with the L – was pulled straight out in the air, like someone was _yanking_ it, really hard, and she got pulled over the edge.”  
  
“That is a very long drop, how did -”  
  
“I can fly. A bit. Please, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know, but not tonight. Can we just talk about her, now?”  
  
“All right. That’s enough sleeping, then, Miss Luthor, I need answers.” Lena’s cheek is tapped gently but firmly, until she manages to blink up at the frowning face of Professor Grant. A quick glance around confirms that they are, as expected, in the hospital wing, but apparently lucky stars do exist, because she is the only one in a bed. Alex and Kara are both sitting on the edge of her mattress, staring at her worriedly.  
  
Suddenly, the locket is dangling in front of her face, just over her nose. “Where did you get this?” her Head of House asks, eyebrows cinching together.  
  
“It was my father’s,” Lena croaks out, her larynx grinding like a flour mill. “He gave it to someone, years ago, and they sent it back to us. After – after he died.”  
  
“Indeed.” The Professor’s lips purse, her gaze turning shrewd. “And you’re sure of that?”  
  
Lena starts. “What do you mean?”  
  
“I mean, are you absolutely sure that some long-lost colleague of Lionel Luthor thoughtfully returned this to his grieving family? Or is it not entirely possible that someone, perhaps a someone with a frequently expressed desire to hurt you, may have played on your recent loss to impart to you an object? An object that they may, perhaps, have cursed?” Her nail traces delicately over the _L_ engraved on the silver locket. “Miss Luthor, during my long career in the Ministry, I came across many… _tokens_ that bore terrible enchantments. Usually, they had been given to Muggles, by those wizards who believe our non-magical neighbours to be somehow less human than ourselves. Baby blankets that are hexed to smother. Gas bottles that are jinxed to leak.”  
  
Lena presses her palms to her eyes. “Lex. God, I’m so stupid. I just – I felt safe here. I didn’t think he could touch me at Hogwarts.”  
  
“And he didn’t,” Grant murmurs. “Why kill you if he could get you to kill yourself?”  
  
She hears Kara start crying; she’s trying to be quiet, so as not to interrupt, but Lena’s so attuned to her that she couldn’t miss it. The sound tugs her heartstrings.  
  
“I must ask, though, Miss Luthor, why it took so long for the curse to take effect? The enchantments on these are usually incredibly powerful, and if I remember correctly, Lionel left us before the school term even started.”  
  
Lena wracks her memory. “I… I sleepwalked a few times earlier in the year, but I thought it was just stress, so I got my friend Jess to cast a binding spell on me before I went to sleep at night. I only didn’t have one tonight – last night – because I was with Kara.”  
  
Kara looks stricken, and Lena wishes she could take the words back; simply say instead that she’d forgotten, purely by chance. But there is no spell for that.  
  
“Miss Luthor, I am going to take this locket to Headmaster Marsdin, who I imagine will call an entire legion of Aurors. I will try and hold off their questions for you for as long as I can, to give you some time to sleep, but as you no doubt know, when Lex Luthor is involved, there is little rest to be had, even for the not-so-wicked.” Professor Grant gazes at her appraisingly for a long moment, then adds, “I’m glad that you are okay, Lena. I shall fail you in my class next year should you tell anyone this, but you are my favourite student to be Sorted into Slytherin for quite some time. You are just as ambitious as the rest of us, if only with the goal of becoming better than you think you are.”  
  
With that, her Head of House leaves, the cursed necklace suspended limply in the air in front of her, unable to hurt anyone anymore.  
  
Kara looks absolutely wrecked, shivering and sobbing into Alex’s embrace, but one of her hands creeps out to tangle tightly with Lena’s.  
  
“It,” she gasps out. “I didn’t see the necklace right away, and… Just for a second, it still looked like you’d stepped.”  
  
When she makes eye contact with her, Lena knows that Kara is seeing the sad, quiet eleven-year-old in the empty compartment; the Quidditch player who refused to talk to anyone after she found out about a dead nineteen-year-old; the girl who walked the castle instead of facing nightmares; the teenager who asked her _what if I’m just hateable?_  
  
“It was all the necklace, Kara,” she promises. “I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay.”  
  
Kara crawls up next to her on the bed, and wraps her arms around her, just like when they were flying.  
  
She doesn’t let go for a very long time.

///

Winn and James set up camp beside her bed, studying and joking and chatting. They don’t try to talk about what happened, for which she is grateful. People seem to be reminding her at every turn that she _nearly died_ , as if she doesn’t know, but her boys just let her focus on how she’s actually still alive. They eat every-flavour beans and talk about Quidditch, and she’s so, so glad to have them.

///

The Auror who talks to her is called Cameron Chase. She confirms what Professor Grant had said about the curse, and informs Lena that they’re moving her to a safe location, a secret Ministry house somewhere far away.  
  
“You’ll have to miss exams, but arrangements will be made, given your academic record. This isn’t permanent, Miss Luthor, but a precaution in case Lex himself makes an attempt to finish what his locket could not.”

///

Kara walks in while Lena is packing. They haven’t spent much time apart lately, and Lena feels both closer to and further from her than ever. She thinks it might be because she loves Kara just as much (or more, always more), but the innocence between them has been lost. They are no longer the same little kids from the train.  
  
“What’s happening? Why are you packing?”  
  
She ditches her trunk, and goes to sit by Kara on the bed, slides an arm around her waist. “I’m going with the Aurors. To somewhere safe.”  
  
Kara fiddles with the sleeve of her robe. “Our house has all those shielding charms, enough that we’d all be safe from Lex. You stayed last summer. Can’t you go there?”  
  
Lena had almost asked for that, she had. But then she’d thought about what she’d read in her Herbology textbook, about the Saviour Vine, and dying trees and pretty flowers. She’d thought about how Kara is the best thing in her life, how Kara pulled her out of the dark, but also how she’ll need to put down new roots of her own if she ever really wants to grow into something.  
  
She doesn’t know how to explain that to Kara, though, so she just tells her, “I can’t.”

///

“I’ll be waiting outside,” Chase calls out, dragging Lena’s trunk behind her as she exits the dorm room. It’s been five days since the Astronomy Tower, but it seems like only twenty minutes for how it hangs in the air, always.  
  
When Kara hugs her goodbye, it feels different from the other hugs they’ve had. It’s softer, but also tighter, somehow. It has more weight. “I’ll miss you,” she whispers into Lena’s hair.  
  
She pulls back a little to reply, and suddenly their faces are just a few inches apart. Lena’s eyes flick down, just slightly, as if Kara’s lips have some sort of gravity.  
  
She realises then, in a wave of lung-crushing panic, that she wants to kiss Kara. Like she really, _really_ wants to. So she jumps back, putting distance between them, the kind of distance that will save Lena from ruining everything they have.  
  
“See you in September, I guess,” Lena mumbles, as she backs up quickly, turning and hurrying out the door. It feels a bit like running away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope that was okay! I've got another SuperCorp story, if you're bored.  
> Leave a comment if you can, I get so excited every time I see one of you has written to me :P


	5. the fifth year

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PLEASE READ: this chapter was the hardest to write. this was partly because everyone seems to have a lot of different hopes and expectations for the story, and i wasn't sure how to live up to them. it was also because this chapter is pretty out of my comfort zone as a writer. i've never actually got up to this point in a fanfiction before.  
> anyway, same rules as usual apply: if you hate it, let me know, and i'll take it down and try again. i'm really, really nervous about sharing this with you, especially because i don't have a beta reader to tell me if it's any good.
> 
> ALSO: I know that canonically, Dementors weren’t used by the Ministry after the wizarding war, but for the purposes of ~drama~, I have chosen to ignore this.

Lena doesn’t really have a spare moment in which to miss Hogwarts. In the past, the summer months were filled with listlessness, reading books and counting stars, except for the brief, flickering weeks she sometimes got to spend with Kara. But running with the Aurors across Europe, fleeing Lex and his reaching fingers, is different from anything else she’s ever done. By the end of it, she feels like _she’s_ different.  
  
Lena’s doing exactly what she promised herself she would: letting little threads of herself unspool, curl into the ground, and staying in the sun long enough that she grows. It’s hard, trying to rebuild herself, to make herself better, but at the same time, it’s the easiest thing she’s ever done. The most important.

///  
  
They keep moving, on the premise that Lex’s influence is far and wide, and remaining in any one place too long makes them sitting ducks.

///  
  
In Romania, they come across a tiny dragon in the forest. It breathes fire at Chase, but allows Lena to inch into its space, its muzzle bumping up against her hand. Its scales are warm, but they don’t burn, and while she’s usually overly cautious around beasts in their Care of Magical Creatures Class (she doesn’t exactly have an affinity with living things), this time she doesn’t pull away. When it licks her hand, its tongue is both sticky and rasping, and she can’t help but laugh at the sensation.

///  
  
In Switzerland, Lena particularly enjoys the fact that she can speak the language, while Chase and the other Aurors cannot. She knows that in the past, she would’ve been too afraid of them hating her unquestioningly to risk taking advantage of that, but she finds it within herself to relax enough to enjoy herding some confused, monolingual adults around, occasionally in the wrong direction. They are chased out of the country by one of her brother’s devotees, who hurls killing curses at their backs all the way across the border.

///  
  
In France, Lena meets a girl with wild red hair and a loud voice who seems to live perpetually on the edge of falling into her next adventure. She is so completely unafraid of her life, and of herself, that Lena cannot help but be envious of her. After a week, the girl leans in to kiss her, and Lena lets her, mostly because she’s hoping it’ll make her immune to the gravity of Kara. When she closes her eyes and finds herself imagining blonde hair and bright eyes as their lips touch, she knows that it hasn’t worked.

///  
  
In Hungary, she spends most of her time with a mute boy of about four. They can’t talk at all, because Lena doesn’t understand sign language, much less Hungarian, but neither of them minds. He shows her his favourite rocks, his pet lizard (which flies), and they play with a snitch together. She teaches him how to weave grass into a crown, high-five and play leap-frog. He knows nothing about her, but he trusts her, and that knowledge makes her feels bigger than she is. On her last day in the village, once she manages to communicate through a series of universal gestures that she’s leaving, he throws his tiny arms around her legs and won’t let go for more than ten minutes. He’s wearing a crown they made together, and she cries when he does.

///  
  
In Germany, she meets a Durmstrang student who can read minds. He takes her to the top of a mountain, into a huge, thick forest, where the canopy is so far above them that Lena can’t make out any detail. He explains to her that because of the slope and the rocks, the roots of the trees have to be winding and tough, and stretch impossibly far and wide. He stares into her eyes, and she knows that he’s checking her thoughts. Perhaps he’s worried that she doesn’t understand what he’s trying to show her, because in his rough English, he explains, “Just like you.”  
  
When he’s walked her back to the concealed cabin that the Aurors are staying at, he places both his hands on her shoulders. “I am having read your mind, Lena. Lots of happy, but there is much of sad also. But very often, I am seeing the Kara. She is most of the happy, and some of the sad, too?” She nods, because while she’s been too busy to miss school, and her classes, and Quidditch, she doesn’t think it’s possible for her to be too busy to miss Kara, no matter how good of a job she does at pretending.

///

There’s no real way to quantify how people grow up, or in Lena’s case, grow into themselves. She can’t hold a ruler up to her sense of worth, or compare diagrams of her confidence. But when Lena catches sight of herself in a mirror while they’re making their way across Lichtenstein, she sees how straight she’s standing, how tall she looks, even though she’s barely two inches bigger than she was last year. The thing she notices most, though, is the way a portcullis of surety has slid down behind her eyes: she’s centred, collected herself into one solid person, like Peter Pan finally re-stitching his shadow. 

///

Halfway through August, they return to a safe house England, and it’s only when Lena gets back home, to overcast skies and church spires, that she feels like she’s really been anywhere else. All the hundreds of things she’s managed to cram into the last eleven weeks start to unravel in her mind, the memories expanding to take up miles of space, and suddenly, it’s as if she was away for decades rather than months.  
  
Lex has been quiet lately, but she suspects that isn’t for a lack of interest in seeing his sister dead so much as it is that he’s decided to re-evaluate how to go about it. She’s been far too protected and mobile and hidden for him to touch lately, but he hates failure, so she knows it’s not over, will never be over.

The minute she’s sure that Chase is asleep in the room upstairs, Lena grabs her broom and kicks off up into the night. This Ministry house is only about a thirty-minute flight from the Danvers’ place, and maybe it’s reckless, she can’t just go to sleep, not with the knowledge that Kara is, for the first time in so long, almost within reach.  
  
When she drops quietly onto the small balcony outside Kara’s room, the lights are already off, but she’s not surprised: it’s nearly two a.m., after all. She knocks gently against the closed window, and then leans back against the railing to wait. The night air is cool around her, and her whips about in the wind, but she doesn’t mind.  
  
Lena smiles softly as Kara rolls out of bed, rubbing her eyes blearily, her pyjama shirt riding up a little (that kills the smile, and she quickly forces her gaze elsewhere). A small thrill goes down her spine as she clocks the exact second Kara sees her, recognises her: her expression brightens and it’s like she’s woken up all at once, and on turns that grin that Lena loves so much (and, hopefully, will one day love the exact normal amount that a friend should).  
  
“Lena, oh my gosh! I can’t believe you’re here! I can’t believe -” Lena suddenly has an armful of blonde fourteen-and-a-half-year-old, and if she’d thought that returning to England was like coming home, it’s got nothing on how she feels now.  
  
“I’m so, so glad to see you,” Lena breathes into her hair, because even though roots are important, right now, she just wants to enjoy the flowers wrapped around the tree. Kara’s grip around her waist gets tighter.  
  
“How are you? Was Chase nice to you? Where did you go? Did Lex try anything? Are you okay?” Kara says all this very fast, before her hands start sliding over Lena’s sides, as if trying to determine that she is, in fact, intact. Lena tries to suppress a shiver, along with the words, _I am now.  
_  
“I’m fine, Kara. Chase is a good Auror, so even when we ran into trouble, we got out of it again.”  
  
“How are you here? I mean, here, with me? Isn’t Lex still out there?”  
  
Lena shrugs. “Yeah. I snuck out.”  
  
Kara punches her arm. “You shouldn’t do that! It’s not safe to be out like that.”  
  
“I guess I’ll have to stay here, then,” she smirks, and Kara narrows her eyes for a second before she cracks, and grabs Lena’s hand, tugging her inside.  
  
Later, they’re lying on Kara’s bed, facing each other, and Kara’s talking at about a hundred words per minute, about her summer, about Alex, about all the things she wishes Lena had been there for. Lena feels like she’s bursting; maybe she doesn’t need Kara to hold her up anymore, might never need that again, but she’s always going to want her, and that’s okay.

///

In the morning, she gets shaken awake by Mr Danvers, who apparently has a quite irate Chase waiting in the living room. Lena gets thoroughly chastised for leaving the safety of the concealed house, and reminded of exactly how much danger she’s in. She doesn’t think it would sit terribly well if she informed Chase that yes, she is indeed aware, and simply decided that the risk was worth it, anyway.  
  
“How did you know that I was here, anyway? Are you tracking me?” Lena can’t see how they could be; since the cursed necklace, she hasn’t accepted any objects from wizards. There’s no way Chase could’ve slipped her an enchanted homing device.  
  
“I don’t need to track _you_ when I know exactly where _Kara_ is,” Chase replies.

///

They end up letting her stay at the Danvers’ for the rest of the summer, partly because it does have all the recommended shielding enchantments, but mostly due to the fact that everyone suspects Kara and Lena would find a way to hang out anyway, even without permission, and at least this way, they’re safe.  
  
This means that Chase is no longer strictly necessary, so she’s called back to the Ministry to keep working on Lex’s active case. Saying goodbye to her is much harder than Lena expected. She’d been stern and short and sharp, but she’d always said goodnight every evening, checked that Lena was doing okay, and they’d done a lot together.  
  
“Write me an update on you every now and then, all right?” Chase mutters. “And I promise I’ll tell you about all the developments with Lex. Even the mostly-confidential ones.”  
  
Lena has no experience with parental figures who actually pay attention to her, so she isn’t sure what to do. She’s trying to be less fearful of expressing herself, though, so she hugs Chase quickly before the Auror slips out the door.  
  
She is hugged back.

///

Maggie comes to hang out for the day, the Wednesday after Lena arrives. She and Kara wisely avoid Alex’s room, and head down to the beach instead.  
  
They go swimming, and Kara looks up at her in surprise when Lena pushes through the waves with a well-developed free style stroke.  
  
“When did you learn to swim?” Kara asks, flicking her with a few droplets, and the memories of wading awkwardly into the sea in summers past swill around Lena  
just like the water.  
  
“Aldo taught me in a lake, when we were in Germany.”  
  
“ _Aldo_ , huh?” Kara enquires suggestively, but she isn’t smirking the same way she does when she teases James about Lucy. Lena doesn’t overanalyse it, not prepared to fall down that particular rabbit hole of misguided hope.  
  
“Yep. Aldo. But stop doing the frowny thing. I didn’t kiss _him_ , or anything,” Lena waves her off, realising too late the emphasis she unconsciously added to the pronoun.  
  
“ _Him_? You mean you kissed a -” A wave that neither of them sees coming knocks hard into Kara, the force of it propelling her straight into Lena. There’s a lot of skin and Lena’s brain starts to overheat; they’re all tangled up in a mess of saltwater and limbs.  
  
“Yes,” Lena says, even though they’re still far too pressed up against each other for them to be having this conversation. “I kissed a girl.” It was definitely a mistake to say those words with Kara’s mouth only two inches from hers, and she’s impossibly glad for the next wave that crashes over them, knocking them apart.

///

“Lena. Lena, wake up.” Something is tapping her face. She wills her eyelids open, and is greeted by darkness. She can’t have been asleep very long at all.  
  
“Kara? What’s wrong? Did you have a nightmare?” she murmurs, reaching out for her friend, eventually locating the blonde's shoulder and rubbing it comfortingly.   
  
“No. I haven’t been able to sleep.” Kara sighs. “I don’t like that you kissed that girl in France. Why do you think that is?” It’s not a rhetorical question, she’s genuinely asking.  
  
Lena presses her palms into her eyes, thinking for a moment. “Well, we’ve always done everything together, right? Same classes, same friends. You’re probably just freaked out because I’ve done something that you haven’t,” Lena reasons. “But don’t worry, Kara. You’re amazing and kind and crazy beautiful, and anywhere you are, there’s going to be people lining up to kiss you,” she assures her.  
  
“Anywhere, huh?” Kara’s voice sounds different when she says that, but Lena’s mind is too blurred by sleep to decipher it.  
  
“Of course. Now go to sleep, Kara. You don’t want to spend all of tomorrow tired and grumpy.”  
  
“You’ll still hang out with me, even if I’m grumpy, right?”  
  
“Even if you’re the grumpiest. Sleep.” Lena’s already halfway unconscious, but then Kara snuggles into her, and suddenly, she’s wide awake again.

///

Kara, to nobody’s surprise, gets a letter accompanied by a tiny badge, informing her that she has been appointed a prefect. A minute later, a rather ruffled looking owl arrives, bearing an identical envelope for Lena, as well.  
  
“I _knew_ you’d be a prefect, Lena. Now we can be prefects together!” Kara is so gleeful at the prospect that Lena can’t help but joke about all the little kids they’ll be able to put in detention, and doesn’t realise that she hasn’t folded in on herself, doubting why they’d pick her for such a role at all.

///

They only get a handful of minutes on the train with Winn and James before they have to leave for the prefect’s compartment. She’s inundated with hugs and hair-pulls and demands to know about her overseas adventures, then asked about souvenirs. 

///

They meet up with the others again as soon as they disembark, and head off to look for an empty carriage together.

When they get off the train, the air seems unusually cold for summer, and as she trails a little behind her friends, she wonders if Hogwarts has implemented some new shielding spell that affects the weather. A moment later, she catches sight of a dark shape, hovering in the air about twenty metres away. It’s eerie and billowing, like the tattered remnants of a scarecrow’s clothes, long after the straw has rotted away; weathered scraps tangling and twisting in the wind.  
  
She has the distinct sensation of being hollowed out as she stares at it.  
  
“It’s a Dementor,” James whispers in her ear, having doubled-back to get her. “They’re here to protect us from Lex. To protect you.”  
  
She nods, but she doesn’t feel protected. She feels frozen deep into her bones.

As they walk past it, it moves suddenly, like a plastic bag blown in a violent wind. It flies straight at her, and before she knows it, slimy hands are clutching her face. She hears James shout behind her, but then all sound is sucked into the vacuum under the Dementor’s hood.  
  
The world around Lena seems to turn into a dozen shades of dark, and Lena’s head fills with horrible memories. Her mother using the freezing curse on her. Her father staring at her with nothing in his eyes. Falling off the Astronomy tower. The blurred voices and hands of her real parents, before they were torn away. Then it changes from recollections of the past to worries of the present. Winn turning his back on her, James yelling at her, Kara pushing her away. It’s as if all the work she did over the summer, all the roots she tried so hard to grow, are being yanked up from the earth with a single touch.

  
The world goes dark.

///

When she comes to, they’re all in the hospital wing. She should really see if she can get some kind of frequent flyers reward, having barely ever made it more than three months without ending up here for some reason or other. Kara’s curled in a chair beside her, her head on Lena’s stomach, and she’s fast asleep. James is out like a light also, draped over the end of the mattress, his legs dangling off the edge. He’s covered in a dusting of crumbs, and a few chocolate frogs left over from the food trolley.  
  
Winn is the only one awake. He’s got Caddy and Wiggles sitting in his lap, their shared adoration of Winn causing them to temporarily abandon their ongoing feud and relax in peace.  
  
“What happened?”  
  
“That Dementor we passed, it tried to Kiss you. And not the good, tingly kind of kiss, but the soul-sucking sort. They’re sending it back to Azkaban. Apparently, it decided that the Ministry wanted it to attack a Luthor, and it didn’t much care which one,” Winn tells her, patting her arm a little awkwardly. He’s become rather nervous around girls lately, and apparently even the fact that he’s known her since they were eleven doesn’t make him entirely immune.  
  
“I feel awful,” Lena admits quietly.  
  
“You won’t after this,” Winn promises, and grabs one of the chocolate frogs scattered around James, handing it to her. “Kara saved you, by the way. That Patronus of hers is really good.”

Lena reaches down and cards her hand through Kara’s hair. The other girl mumbles softly in her sleep, pressing her face into Lena’s sweater, her hand tightening its grip on the sheet.

She thinks she’s doing a good job of keeping her expression impassive as she looks at her best friend, but judging by the way Winn nudges her delicately and mutters “so you finally figured it out, huh?”, she isn’t as smooth as she’d like to believe.

///

All of her teachers bring up their impending OWLs in their first classes of the year. Some of the kids turn pale at the warning in their tones, as if these gruelling exams are an unexpected plot twist. Lena’s been ready for them forever, though, and the prospect of hours spent learning and revising isn’t nearly as threatening to her as it is to many of her classmates.

///

Kara lists off all the homework she’s got, eventually running out of fingers to count the tasks on.  
  
“Aww, poor baby. You’ll survive,” Alex teases, attempting to feign understanding but coming across as more gleeful than anything. Lena imagines it’s hard to drum up too much sympathy for them when she’s already suffered through the OWLs and is staring down the barrel of her NEWTs, but Kara still pouts.  
  
“That’s the last time I come talk to you about my exam woes,” Kara complains. She huddles closer to Lena. “Lena will be nice to me, won’t you?”  
  
“Mm hmm,” she mumbles in ascent.  
  
Maggie (head resting on Alex’s lap as she reads her Transfiguration textbook) coughs out something that sounds a lot like _whipped_. Both Alex and Kara shrug it off, unfamiliar with Muggle slang, but Lena glares at her.

///

The DEO continues to meet up. In the wake of the Dementor attack on Lena, Professor Henshaw gets them to revisit the Patronus charm. The seemingly inevitable, unending darkness that had rolled over her while the creature’s hands framed her face has long since dissipated, and Lena has no real trouble conjuring her phoenix.  
  
It’s not a scraggly baby bird anymore, either, but larger and more elegant. When it flies above her now, it soars.  
  
She’s proud of it. Proud of herself.

///

A few weeks into the term, she gets a letter from Chase detailing Lex’s recent activity. In what appears to be an attempt to entertain himself while he waits for an opportunity to get to Lena, he has left a trail of murdered Muggles all through East London.  
  
She throws up in the bathroom after reading that, the names of six dead people churning around in her stomach. Killed instead of her.  
  
Lena hears the door click open behind her.  
  
“Kara, I’m not -”  
  
“It’s me,” Winn says softly, coming to sit on the cool tiles beside her.  
  
Lena nods at him, but can’t manage a smile. “This is a girls’ bathroom, Winn.”  
  
He shrugs. “And I’m sure I’ll soon be yelled at by a cloud of freaked out teenagers, but I think I can take it. Maybe.”  
  
They sit in silence for a moment, Lena trying to keep the bile down, closing her eyes against Chase’s words, and Winn rubbing her back.  
  
“Kara wanted to come after you,” he tells her. “But I told her not to. She just wants to keep you safe from everything, you know? She wants you to be settled and happy all the time. Because that’s how Alex always tried to make her feel when she was little and still sad. And Kara lost people, and it was tragic, but she’s never been tied to evil. Never felt responsible for it. But I have. And I know that sometimes, you need to feel terrible for a while, let it wash over you and then let it go, if you ever want to be all right again. Let it all bleed out instead of getting a bandage, right?”  
  
She nods. “You can be pretty smart for only a Ravenclaw,” she jokes, and it’s weak, but Winn humours her with a laugh anyway.  
  
She curls into his chest, fingers bunched in his robes, and they stay on the floor together, missing morning classes. Lena thinks about those new roots of hers, and how those rotting ones aren’t quite gone yet; but she’s also starting to figure out that you can be weak and strong at the same time, and she might be able to stand on her own, but if Winn holds her hand while she does it, then there’s no shame in that.

///

“Do you think Wiggles is evil?” Kara asks conversationally, holding her pigmy puff up to eye level and scrutinising him.  
  
Lena glances up, tilting her head and disrupting its incredibly comfortable tenure in Kara’s lap. She’s trying to study for Potions, but it’s hard to focus like this. Not that she’s made any attempt to move.  
  
“Why would you even ask that? You’ve had him since you were, what, twelve?”  
  
“Exactly twelve. You gave him to me for my birthday. And I was just wondering, because he seems so nice all the time, but he’s so mean to Caddy.”  
  
“Mean and evil aren’t exactly the same. Also, I’m pretty sure Caddy steals his food, so it might not be totally unprovoked.”  
  
Wiggles squeaks in apparent agreement, puffing up to twice his size, and Kara giggles.

///

A boy has transferred from Durmstrang into Slytherin in Lena’s year. He’s from one of those old wizarding families that give their kids ridiculous and archaic names (she’s pretty sure his is Mon-El), but everyone calls him Mike. She’s not fussed on his constant begging for her to help him get on to the Quidditch team, but she doesn’t have a real problem with him. Until he meets Kara. Then, she has a very significant, bold-and-italics, three-dimensional, hundred-pound problem with him.

///

Kara and Lena manage to wrangle it so that they get to do their night-time prefect patrol together. It’s fun, pacing around the castle, chatting as they go, not noticing when their rotation ends. The last time she spent this much time walking the corridors, it was third year, and she was plagued by constant nightmares. These hours with Kara, though, somehow don’t remind her of that time at all.

///

Lena’s not allowed to go to Hogsmeade this year, given the increased security prompted by Lex. The Dementors, the restrictions; they all make her feel like he’s still controlling her life, without even having to be the one pulling the puppet strings. She doesn’t want to let him, so she sneaks through the One-Eyed Witch passageway and meets up with her friends in Honeydukes.

///

Kara seems pretty uninterested in Mike – to the point where his attempts at flirting can be almost painful at times – but that doesn’t make Lena dislike him any less. She figures that as long as she never tries to intervene between them (it’s Kara’s life, Kara’s choice, and as much as Lena wishes she could factor in to the reasons not to date Mike, she knows she does not), it’s okay for her to glare at him from the side-lines.

///

OWLs are still months away, but Lena's already deeply entrenched in study, her trunk full of notes and index cards from previous years, ready to be practiced and memorised. She’s well aware of the cramming that goes on in the weeks leading up to the exams, and she wants no part in that – she needs perfect Os, because she isn’t entirely sure what subjects she wants to take in senior year yet, and she doesn’t want to limit her options.  
  
She drags Kara with her to the library on Sundays, although thanks largely to Alex’s teasing fear-mongering, she doesn’t have to work that hard to get her best friend to join in.

///

For Care of Magical Creatures, Professor M’orzz has shipped in some miniature dragons for them to familiarise themselves with as preparation for the creatures they may have to work with in the OWL practical.  
  
It’s the same breed she encountered in Romania, and Lena surprises everyone by being the only one that the little beasts don’t snort fire at. She’d assumed it was just that one in the forest over the summer who had taken a liking to her, but apparently dragons _adore_ Lena. By halfway through the lesson, she has three in her lap, and another perched on her shoulder, and she runs her fingers up their scaly spines delicately, listening to their stomachs rumbling happily while a number of other classmates watch enviously.  
  
Lena wonders what it says about her that she handles fire-breathing reptiles the same way most people handle puppies.  
  
She glances up and catches Kara’s eye. “Aren’t they so cute?” she mouths, grinning, and Kara nods, a soft look in her face.

///

It's getting increasingly hard to remember why she shouldn't kiss Kara. Some moments, she almost slips up, almost just leans across and does it, but the little voice in the back of her mind stops her every time. They're best friends, Kara's everything, and she'd never get over wrecking all that. 

///

In the back of the photo album that Kara gave her for her fourteenth birthday, she has added a handful of pictures from her travels. Sometimes, she goes back and flicks through them – revisiting the mind-reader and the French girl and the tiny mute boy in his grass crown. She shows some of them to the others, but most she keeps just for herself. The snapshot of the giant forest that Aldo took her to, though, she pins to her headboard, next to her pictures of her friends and the Hollyhead Harpies poster that James gave her for Christmas last year.

///

Kara hasn’t got any better at potions since their first year. While she’s a sure bet for an O in Herbology and Care of Magical Creatures, this subject is the only one she’s actually worried about failing.

Lena comes down to an empty dungeon classroom with her a couple of times a week, and reads while Kara practices the concoctions they might be tested on. The temptation to help her out is hard to resist, but Lena does, because it’s the only way to learn. She does regrow Kara’s eyebrows for her after cauldron’s contents explodes in a puff of fiery yellow smoke, though.

///

It’s Friday night, and they’re scheduled to patrol until one a.m. After about two hours in which absolutely nothing in the castle moves, even the people in the portraits, Kara is antsy and bored.  
  
“Want to sneak out to the courtyard and practice your flying, like we did in fourth year?” Lena offers, because maybe Maggie was a little bit right, maybe she is slightly whipped, and would do anything to put the smile back on Kara's face.  
  
“I… I haven’t even tried since last year. Since the Astronomy Tower,” Kara mumbles. Lena forgets sometimes that that evening must have been fairly traumatic for Kara, too: thinking her best friend was going to die, wondering for a second if she’d wanted to.  
  
She takes Kara’s hand. “Come on. Flying saved us, it didn’t ruin us. Don’t let Lex take it away from you.” A nod. “We’re going to shove how amazing you are back in his face, alright? You’re going to fly again.”  
  
It’s a five-minute walk to the courtyard, but the distance only takes them two, because they run. Kara stands in front of her, looking nervous, worried that she’s rusty, out of practice after months of keeping her feet on the ground.  
  
“It’s all right, Kara. I’ll catch you if you fall,” Lena smiles at her, and that seems to give the other girl the courage she needs.  
  
After a few seconds of concentration, Kara begins to hover, about six inches in the air, before slowly raising to nearly a whole foot. She’s doing well until she opens her eyes, and her focus breaks. She tumbles forward and down, and just like Lena promised, she catches her.  
  
What Lena did not foresee was how close this would leave them, how Lena’s arms would end up wrapped around her waist and Kara’s would be draped about her neck. How Kara would look so beautiful and bright under those stars she loves so much, and how powerless Lena would be against that old gravity between them.  
  
She kisses her.  
  
It’s slow and delicate and gentle, and even though Kara’s landed, Lena’s definitely flying. The kiss is soft, but her fingers dig a little in Kara’s ribs – she needs an anchor, something to remind her that it’s all real. Lena’s arteries feel like they’re imploding, but it doesn’t matter, because they are replaced by spidery strings of warmth.  
  
It’s everything she imagined – it’s more, because it’s Kara, and she’s never been anything less than completely overwhelmed by her – which makes it all the worse when she pulls away.  
  
Kara doesn’t say anything, she looks sort of dazed, actually, but Lena can only assume that it’s quite difficult to find the words to tell your best friend that you don’t like them _like that._ So she backs up awkwardly (her brain is yet to stop simmering, to settle back into its proper place in her skull), then fast, turning away, walking quickly into the darkness.   
  
Their patrol is over, anyway, so Lena is free to go back to her dorm room and stare at the ceiling until sunrise, wishing desperately that she had a time-turner, that she had pulled back instead of leaning forward.  
  
No such luck, though.

///

When she sees Kara in the corridor the next morning on the way to breakfast, she hurriedly takes a left and heads up the invisible staircase (she and the architecture have always had an understanding, and it briefly flickers into visibility for her). She misses breakfast, but whatever.  
  
Lena spends the day hiding out in top of the Astronomy Tower, because it’s the only place no one would ever think she’d go, and returns to the dormitories too late for anyone to intercept her.

She finds Wiggles waiting on her bed. Lena pets him, feeds him (can’t help but be reminded of better times, innocent ones, of the day she gave him to Kara), and sends him back to the Hufflepuff dorms, note tied to his leg left unopened. She can’t bring herself to read whatever Kara’s written.  
  
She repeats the process on Sunday, in the futile hope that if she avoids Kara long enough, the other girl will simply _forget._ More than anything in the world, she wants things to go back to the way they were. Well – the kiss flashes through her head, incredible and tragic all at once – maybe not more than _anything._

///

Kara seems to get that Lena doesn’t want to (can't) talk to her, because she doesn’t seek her out, and their paths don’t cross anymore. 

///

By Monday afternoon, the rumour that Kara Danvers and Lena Luthor Aren’t Talking has made a full lap of Hogwarts. The popular theory is that they’ve had a fight, and she never bothers to correct anyone.  
  
To her surprise, the girls in her dorm band around her in the fallout of it all. They take to sitting on either side of her in their shared classes, forcing the desks’ previous occupants to find alternative places that leave them far away from Lena.  
  
“We’ve seen you two together for years, Lena. We know you’d never do anything to hurt her,” Jess tells her, when Lena finally asks why they’re doing all this for her.  
  
“You think _she’d_ hurt _me_?”  
  
Jess eyes her for a long moment. “Not on purpose. But that’s not really the same thing, is it?”

///

Lena wonders sometimes if the castle itself is humouring her, guiding her down different passageways and up different staircases, because it shouldn’t be quite as easy to avoid Kara as it is. Lena isn’t sure at what point she’ll be unable to resist the magnetism that tries to pull her back to where she belongs, isn't sure exactly what she's waiting for. Maybe when she can convince herself that it doesn’t matter anymore, that she’s ready to be _just friends_ , that she won’t want to kiss Kara again.  
  
She might always be waiting.

///

She caves by Wednesday and starts hanging out with Winn and James again, but only occasionally, because she’d rather they were with Kara. Lena discovers that she’s amassed a surprising amount of other friends in her time at Hogwarts, and ends up spending more time with the boys from her Quidditch team, the other Slytherin girls, and the students from the OWLs study group she’d joined last month. Revising with them has nothing on studying with Kara, but she’s not trying to replace Kara, or her other friends, would never try; she just wants to stop up the worst of the holes that they leave behind.

///

Winn and James are avoiding taking sides, mostly because they have no idea what happened between the two girls. Lena’s sure that if they found out that she’d broken Kara’s trust and tanked their friendship like that, they’d be mad at her, but they’d stick around anyway. She’s getting good at believing in people. Her life is full of things like that: lessons she’d learned from Kara, or taught herself because of her. 

///

“Do you want to know how she’s doing?” Winn asks suddenly, in the middle of a game of wizarding snap.  
  
Lena stares at her lap for a long moment. “No,” she grinds out. Either Kara is sad, or doing great without her, and both options will wreck Lena just the same.

///

Maggie throws her a chocolate frog from across the corridor when they’re both on their way to different classes. Lena catches it, and it tastes like memories of Alex freaking out in a broom cupboard, and resolutions after boggarts. Lena's pretty sure that Maggie doesn't know exactly what went down between her girlfriend's sister and Lena, but also that she's not finding it that hard to guess.  
  
Lena thinks Maggie gets it.  
  
The fear of breaking something; of having broken it.

///

“She really wants to see you, you know,” James tells her. It’s just the two of them, lying in front of the fire in the Gryffindor common room, ostensibly studying but really telling bad Muggle jokes and complaining about professional Quidditch players. “It doesn’t matter what happened between you.”  
  
Lena sighs. “It does matter. And it takes two people to avoid each other as well as we have.”  
  
James grabs her hand. “Lena, she’s just trying to give you space, I think.”  
  
“It’s only been two weeks, James. We’ve gone longer than that without speaking before.”  
  
He squeezes her fingers tighter for a moment. “That was over the summer, L, when we were little. At least she knew then that when she saw you next, you’d hug her. Now, you don’t talk to her because you don’t _want_ to.”  
  
“God, James, I want to,” Lena whispers, because she might have screwed it up with the girl she’s liked forever, but worse than that, she’s ruined things with her best friend.

///

Time passes slower than it ever has at school for Lena. She knows that something has to give, sooner or later. They can’t do this forever, not two people who’ve been best friends for as long as they have. But she still tries, because the alternative is suffering through the awkward, stilted rebuilding of a one-dimensional version of what they used to be.

She sees it when she closes her eyes: Kara trying to let her down easy, trying to find a way to act normal, but still drifting away.

///

Lena’s on her way back from class when she is grabbed fiercely by her green and silver tie and dragged into the nearby broom closet.  
  
The second that the door clicks shut behind them, Kara shoves her against the stone wall. “Are you just going to avoid me forever?”  
  
“No, I was… Kara, please step back a bit,” Lena mutters, because it’s ready hard to think straight – think _at all_ – with Kara is such proximity, especially after so long apart.  
  
But Kara presses closer, and _how is she supposed to talk this out now?_ “I thought if I gave you enough time, you’d figure out… I thought you’d come back.”  
  
Lena sighs, fixes her gaze on the floor. “Kara…”  
  
“You don’t just get to kiss me and then run away, Lena. Not for two and a half _weeks._ It’s so – you’re – ugh, I’m just -”  
  
“Look, Kara, I know you’re angry. I’ve dealt with this all really badly, and please understand I am _so_ sorry. And -”  
  
“I’m not _angry._ ”  
  
“You’re not?”  
  
“Okay, a little.” She pushes Lena’s shoulders in frustration, but the wall is already against her back, so all that happens is that they’re even closer than before. “But mostly I’m just – and you’re so – and – god, Lena.”  
  
“You don’t know what you want to say, do you?” Lena asks, and it’s so Kara, to be stumbling awkwardly over words, that she can’t help but smile. They might’ve changed, but at least she hasn’t.  
  
“No,” Kara agrees, but then her hands are skating from Lena’s shoulders up the column of her neck, finally coming to rest on her jaw. “I do know what I want to do, though.”  
  
Then the distance between them is gone, Kara’s mouth is on hers, and Lena’s fingers fist in Hufflepuff robes. Her mind is yet to catch up with this turn of events, but her body is miles ahead, her arms sliding up Kara’s back to pull her even harder against her. There are hands tangling in her hair, and she can hear Kara’s soft, sharp intake of breath in the heartbeat that their lips separate before they’re kissing again. Lena feels like she’s flying, and it’s a few seconds before she realises that she actually _is_ – the two of them, they’re hovering a few inches above the ground.  
  
“Kara,” she mumbles.  
  
“Oh.” They drop back to the floor. “I’m sorry -”  
  
Lena kisses her again, smiles into her mouth, links her fingers with Kara’s. She thinks about how she felt when she won her first Quidditch match, produced a proper Patronus, reached the top of that mountain in Germany, and yeah, this is better. This is the best.

///

Eventually (meaning after one broken broom, a missed class and Kara being pressed up against a door for ten minutes), Lena gets her thoughts into something like alphabetical order, and knows that they should talk.  
  
“I’m sorry I ran away, back in the courtyard,” Lena whispers, once they’re sitting on the floor together, Kara’s head resting on her shoulder as Lena’s hand traces through her blonde hair. “I shouldn’t have done that. I should’ve asked, I should’ve -”  
  
“I wanted you to kiss me,” Kara tells her, her fingers toying with the edge of her robes. “I wanted you to kiss me that night on the summer, too. But you didn’t, then.”  
  
“Wait, _what?_ ” Lena feels distinctly cheated by circumstance, wishing she could go back in time and kick her past self. “So for the past two and half weeks -”  
  
Kara’s hand finds hers. “I thought you were confused, that you needed time to deal with it all. I didn’t want to push you. We’ve known each other a really long time, Lena. I remember when you were too shy to barely say more than six words to me, when you didn’t want to try out for Seeker, when you stayed up for hours instead of telling anyone about your nightmares. And I know I helped you with all that stuff, but I figured that you needed to decide whether you wanted this, whether you liked me, all on your own.”  
  
“God, Kara, I’ve liked you for _years_ ,” Lena breathes out.  
  
“That’s what Alex said. That, and to stop giving you time to talk yourself out of everything,” Kara explains. "But told her I wanted you to have the space you needed. Except then, it was taking too long, and I was worried you would take _forever_ , so -”

“So you dragged me into a broom closet?”

“Exactly.”

///

Lena doesn’t start panicking until they go back to her dorm room to hang out, and she sees that Chase’s latest letter has been delivered. Within the walls of the broom cupboard, everything had been perfect, and Lena had felt untouchable. But the envelope on her pillow is a harsh, one-way ticket back to the real world, and she remembers that she is a _Luthor_ , and no matter all her efforts and plans, at the moment, that still means uncertainty, danger, and a twisted road ahead.  
  
She doesn’t need to read the letter to know what it says; all of Chase’s most recent updates have centred around Lex’s growing group of supporters, his reach extending throughout Europe. She’s not safe, but worse than that, far worse, is the fact that Lex has never cared about collateral damage.  
  
“I can’t do this,” Lena mutters suddenly. “I can’t – with you.” Because if she and Kara become something, then Lex will find out somehow, she’s sure of it, and then the target that _Luthor_ paints on her back will be on Kara’s, too. She steps away, backs up, her hand slipping out of Kara’s, putting distance between them.  
  
“Lena, what -”  
  
“Kara, he’s still out there. It’s bad enough that we’re best friends. If he hears that we’re – that I… If he can’t get to me, Kara, what would stop him from going for you? He wants me, and if he thought he had to hurt you to get me, he wouldn’t even blink, he wouldn’t…” Lena feels sick. How fitting that the second it’s all in reach, Lex snatches it right out of her grasp.  
  
“Hey. Hey! Lena, look at me. You can never make sure that _everyone_ is going to be safe, okay? You can’t. But you can keep living how you want to and cross your fingers.” Kara’s thumbs sweep over her cheeks. “We’re at Hogwarts right now, the most protected place in England. My dad’s an Auror, my house is shielded, nothing’s going to happen to me.”  
  
“You can’t be sure.”  
  
“I’m sure about you,” Kara tells her, and hugs her tight. Lena doesn’t flinch, doesn’t pull back, even though she probably should. But she doesn’t know how to _not_ want Kara so badly that everything else fades into the background.

///

Because she can’t supress fears of Lex entirely, they keep it a secret. Whatever _it_ is. They might be dating, but Lena isn’t sure, because nothing’s really changed. They still study in the library, except sometimes, Lena holds Kara’s hand under the table. They still talk in the dormitories, but if they’re alone, conversations can rapidly devolve into kissing. Her life is full of little changes, like puzzle pieces shifting into place around her.

Finally, though, she has to know for sure.

“Hey, you’d be my girlfriend, right?”  
  
“Yep.”  
  
“Cool.”  
  
Lena grins, passes Kara another chocolate frog. They go on with their conversation about werewolves as if no one’s said anything. She guesses that there wasn't really all that much about the two of them that had to change. 

///

Despite their supposed secrecy, Alex takes exactly one look at them before she smirks and hugs them both, taking the opportunity to she whisper “hurt her and I’ll hex you into the next life” in Lena’s ear.

Winn and James do them the courtesy of pretending they don’t know anything’s changed, apart from a couple of not-so-subtle jokes, but it seems that the rest of the school really is oblivious.  
  
She wishes she could tangle her fingers with Kara’s in the hallways, or kiss her cheek before heading to her separate class, but she can’t have Kara like that _and_ keep her safe, so she’s happy with stolen moments in broom cupboards and Quidditch sheds.

///

Mike still flirts with Kara, often in class when she’s sitting right next to Lena. Instead of clenching her jaw until it shatters, she takes to staring at the ceiling, going over her Transfiguration index cards in her head, and tries to pretend she doesn’t care. 

She does.  
  
Kara seems to work this out pretty quickly, though, because after one particularly painful class shared with the transfer student, she pulls Lena into an alcove hidden behind a tapestry.  
  
“You look mad.”  
  
“I’m not,” Lena assures her. And it’s true. She isn’t. She’s just… uncomfortable. Crowded with the knowledge that if Mike dated Kara, they wouldn’t have to worry about a homicidal maniac. Kara gazes at her expectantly, so Lena sighs, and does her best to explain that feeling.  
  
“Lena, I’m not with you _in spite_ of Lex. I’m with you because you’re _you_ and we’re _us,_ and all of that other stuff is just… other stuff. I am, however, with you _in spite_ of the fact that you don’t support the Chudley Cannons.”  
  
Lena rolls her eyes, but the effect is ruined by the smile on her face. “Kara, they haven’t won since 1892, it’s time to let them go.”

“They’re just the _underdogs_ , Lena.”

Lena kisses her, then, and Mike doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

///

The stress in the weeks leading up to the OWLs is tangible. It spreads through the castle like a virus, sending their cohort into a flurry of panicked study. Lena, who has been memorising their material as she goes over the last few years, is one of the few who remains calm.  
  
“I hate that you’re so smart. You studied stuff for like twenty minutes back in third year and you _still_ know it,” Kara grumbles, dramatically slamming her textbook closed on the library desk and getting up to go sit on the floor beside them.  
  
“You and James shouldn’t have wasted much time on your wizarding snap tournament this year, while Lena and I were joining study groups and revising,” Winn points out, a little smugly. He’s also beyond ready for these tests, and he and Lena are taking turns to change the colour of the fire to entertain themselves while the others pour over their old notes.  
  
“Kara, don’t worry. Winn and I can’t really study for the practical, and that’s where you and James always nail it,” Lena assures her, absently kissing her cheek as she attempts to turn the fire purple.

///

After their last OWL (History of Magic), their brains are completely fried, and they barely manage to drag themselves out to the lake before they collapse onto the ground, groaning in agony and relief.  
  
“I can’t believe it’s _over._ I can’t believe we did it!” James crows gleefully, throwing a fist up in the air tiredly, elatedly. Winn and Kara happily whoop, already talking about all the revision sheets and notebooks that they fully into intend to burn.    
  
Lena just lies there are thinks about how happy she is, Kara’s hand in hers, exams behind them, future ahead. She’s not sure exactly what that will entail for any of them, but with the four of them together in the sunlight on the shore of the lake, surrounded by memories of younger versions of themselves, it’s hard to imagine that it’ll be anything other than bright.

///

She’s chatting to Kara after the last Quidditch game of the year, the barely-fluttering snitch still grasped tightly in her fist.  
  
“Hey, um, Lena?” She turns around, and there’s Donovan, looking a little red and rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. His beater’s bat is resting on his shoulder.  
  
“What’s up, Don?” She grins at him – he’d saved her from about a dozen bludgers, she’d caught the snitch, and Kara’s right next to her; life’s pretty good right now.  
  
“I, uh – I was wondering you’d like to go out sometime? Now that all your exams are over, and it’s nearly the summer.”  
  
Lena starts, opens her mouth a few times, completely unsure how to politely turn him down. She really does like Donovan, he’s a good friend, and she doesn’t want to make things awkward between them right before weeks and weeks apart, lest it be weird next year. The seconds tick by too fast as Lena scrabbles for words.  
  
“She’s busy,” Kara cuts in, frowning.  
  
“For the whole three months?” Donovan asks, confused.  
  
“Yep. All of them. Come on, Lena.” A slightly disoriented Lena is suddenly being pulled under the house supporters’ bleachers, leaving a puzzled Slytherin beater behind.  
  
Once they’re alone, Kara pokes her hard in the shoulder. “You didn’t say no to him.”

She looks hurt, and Lena should really hug her, or something, but she can’t help it – she laughs. It’s impossible not to, because Kara really doesn’t seem to understand that Lena has never even _looked_ at Donovan, at anyone else; has been dividing her time since she was eleven between wishing Kara would like her back and pretending that she didn’t like Kara at all.  
  
Lena cuts herself off at the look on Kara’s face. “Whoa, hey, no. No, no. It’s just – my life is ridiculous right now. Everything I’ve ever wanted is right there. I feel so stupidly lucky every time I look at you, and I guess, I just forget you don’t know that. I sort of just assumed that it was all over my face.”  
  
Lena wants to kiss her, but can’t be sure if that would be a bad idea right now. Her girlfriend’s frown hasn’t entirely departed. It’s what Alex calls her Upset Puppy face, and it drills right through Lena’s chest every time without fail.  
  
“Come on, Kara, you know I’m crazy about you.”

This time, she risks it, and gently presses their lips together. And even though they’ve had hundreds of kisses by now, she still goes kind of weak and drops the snitch when Kara kisses her back.

///

On the second last day of school, three Aurors show up, and escort Lena into Professor Grant’s office. The Head of Slytherin is currently out, separating a mass duel in the courtyard, so they’re all alone.

Lena can’t figure out what’s going on, because for once, Lex hasn’t tried anything at all. She hasn’t got death threats in months, nothing’s tried to pull her off the Astronomy Tower, and none of the Dementors has so much as encountered one of his henchmen.  
  
Chase is looking at her with such a deadly serious and set expression that Lena could mistake her for a statue. “Lex isn’t any closer to being caught,” she begins, running a hand through her hair.  
  
Lena twists her fingers together. “I figured. It’s been nearly three years since he escaped. Three years and nothing.”  
  
“The longer he’s out there, the more Muggles disappear, and the bigger the threat he presents grows. He doesn’t just kill, Lena, he converts. He validates fanatic purebloods with misplaced bigotry, and the more of them that there are, the less we can control them,” Chase explains. “We… we can’t keep chasing him, Lena. There’s got to be a line where you stop running after something, and instead make it come back to you.”  
  
“You’re going to draw him out? But how -”  
  
“By dangling in front of him the one thing that he wants.”  
  
Lena’s stomach drops, but she straightens her spine. “Right,” she says. “Me.”  
  
Chase gives a nod. “I know you’re not even sixteen yet, and it’s too much to ask of someone so young, but...”  
  
“It’s okay,” Lena says softly. She’s a Luthor, and that means something. It means that her good has to be just as good as Lex’s bad is bad. “I’ll do it.”  
  
“Lena, we’ll do our best, believe me, but we can’t guarantee your safety."  
  
She nods. “I know.”

///

For the first time in her whole life, she lies to Kara. She tells her that because she’s the only one who really knew Lex and is willing to cooperate with the Ministry, the Aurors want to borrow her for their taskforce to go over their recent evidence and help them look for clues.  
  
“You’ll be safe, though, right?” Kara asks, her fingers dancing at Lena’s waist, straightening her sweater unnecessarily.  
  
“Yeah. I’ll be at headquarters.” In truth, Lena has no idea where she’ll be. She feels rotten inside, deceiving, but if last year with the Astronomy Tower taught her anything, it’s that Kara will do stupidly brave things when it comes to her. And she can’t risk that. “I'll come visit you as soon as it's over, I promise.”  
  
Before she leaves, she kisses Kara hard, and holds her tight. Even if it all goes wrong, even if she doesn’t come back, she doesn’t feel like she has left any loose ends.


	6. the sixth year

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hate this chapter soooooo much but i couldn't seem to make it work for me. those who follow me on tumblr would know i've had a pretty rough couple of days, but i really wanted to get you guys an update. i'll probably take this down at some point and make serious changes, because it's pretty clunky and disappointing. anyway, sorry.
> 
> also i go more into raw magic this chapter 
> 
> tw/ there is a spell in this that features symptoms similar to "locked in syndrome"; also tw: panic attack

The idea is simple.  
  
Lena and Chase move into in a new Ministry safe house, one deliberately designed to have slight weaknesses in security: not enough shielding flaws to look like a trap, but enough to entice Lex with the promise of victory. Chase's connection in Lex's circle then leaks the location of their hideout.

Even though she knows that an entire legion of Aurors are staked out in the nearby forest, at the ready for the first sign of her brother, Lena can’t seem to function. She keeps her back to the wall, memorises the exits, and tries not to go completely insane while they wait to see if Lex will make a move. It's only a matter of time.

Paranoia traces silky fingers up and down her spine, and she can’t sleep, can’t do anything but stare at the ceiling until dawn, wishing she could be with Kara, wishing she wasn’t a Luthor, wishing that Lex would just _come get her already._

A week passes, long enough that even the Aurors are getting antsy, and they all begin to wonder if they’ve used the wrong bait for their snare.  
  
“He would’ve come by now if he was going to, Lex was never patient,” Lena tells Chase after they’ve been confined to the house for twelve days (it feels like forever). The truth is, impatience is a Luthor trait that they share, because she’d thought this whole thing would be over by now – one way or another – and the urge to see Kara is killing her.

Chase sighs, opens her mouth to reply, and that’s when everything goes to hell.  
  
The windows of the house shatter inwards, the ceiling caves, and they’re being swarmed by figures in black cloaks. The invaders flood into the house like ants, wands out, light already flashing as spells are flung wildly around. Chase is already throwing up shielding charms, unable to fight back against the onslaught, not alone and trying to protect Lena at the same time.  
  
Someone grabs her arm, fingers gripping tight enough to cut off her circulation, and she barely has time to scream before she’s being hit with a stunning curse, then Apparated away.

///

When Lena comes to, she’s lying on the grass in a clearing, the moon flaring brightly in her eyes, making her wince. Giant trees stretch up around them, and she realises that they must not be too far from the house, because she’s seen that variety of oak every time she’s glanced out the window lately. She can’t feel her wand in her pocket, but she supposes it would’ve been too much to ask for whoever took her to leave her armed.  
  
A few feet away, there’s three robed figures, all watching her curiously as if they’re at some kind of zoo. They’ve all got hoods concealing their faces, but she can still recognise the figure in the middle. The way he stands - she’d know that anywhere.  
  
“Hey, Lex,” Lena mumbles. This is the part in storybooks where characters usually say something snappy and defiant, like _long time no see_ , but the truth is, she’s too tired for that. Having her brother looming over her shoulder for the last three years, breathing down her neck even from miles away, has exhausted her, and she doesn’t have the energy to do anything but stare him in the eyes, because she may be a Slytherin, but she’s not a coward.  
  
He pushes back his cowl, and even though her memories of him have blurred with time, they all snap back into high definition the second she can see him clearly. It’s the same boy who taught her Quidditch and read her fairy tales and sang her Christmas carols while she sat on his lap. The same boy who murdered dozens of Muggles, sent threatening letters, and curse a necklace to make her jump off the Astronomy Tower. Trying to comprehend so many contradictions makes her head ache.  
  
“Hey there, Lena,” he smiles, and she shivers. It’s not the same smile that she remembers, but then again, maybe she was young and naïve and gazed at him through the rose-tinted lens of sibling adoration. “How’s it going? How’s school? I hear that you’re doing very well. Top of your class.”  
  
He sounds almost proud, and it makes her stomach twist. “Come on, Lex. Don’t do this. You got me, just do it, kill me like you’ve been promising to since I was thirteen.” She thinks about her girlfriend, how Kara would want her to fight back, but she’s got nothing. She’s only just turned sixteen, she’s got no wand, she’s alone, and her brother is more powerful than a handful of ordinary grown wizards combined. So she’ll do the only thing she can: she won’t scream or cry or beg, she’ll take his enjoyment out of it, and that’ll have to be enough.  
  
Lex’s mouth tugs down in a slight frown. “Lena, kiddo,” – she flinches at the nickname – “if you’d been reading my letters, instead of just burning them, you’d know that I don’t want to kill you anymore. Well, at least, not conventionally.”  
  
“Conventionally? Murder too mainstream these days, Lex?” she asks, and if she sounds bitter, it’s because she is. He won’t even let her have familiarity with her demons. It’s too late in the game, it’s not fair to change the rules now.  
  
“I’ve been experimenting with some new magic,” he explains, and he’s so gleeful, it reminds her of the time he showed her how model trains worked on her sixth birthday. “With all that time I spent in Azkaban, I got pretty familiar with the Dementors. I was, understandably, very envious. Killing just a mind, not a body? It’s so much cleaner, tidier. I spent a lot of last year trying to work out if a wizard could have the same effect as a Kiss, if I could suck out someone’s soul. It turns out that I can’t,” he adds, frowning, and she breathes out in relief. “What I can do, though, is make you bury your soul so deep inside yourself that almost nothing can draw  
it out. Are you familiar with raw magic, Lena?”  
  
She is, but only because of Kara, and the less he knows about her girlfriend, the better. “No.”  
  
“It’s what magical children use before we teach them how to harness it with spells and charms. What I came across in my research is a kind of raw magic defence mechanism, which kicks in when the body is in extreme, unimaginable pain. It works even on trained wizards. After a certain threshold of agony, the magic in your blood will hide your soul away so far in the back of your mind that nothing can touch it. You’ll still be able to think, perhaps have some of your other senses, too, but no movement, no speech. Nothing that could let you live. You’ll be a prisoner. Like I was. Except instead of a cell, it’ll be your own head. Isn’t that magnificent, Lena? Isn’t magic so incredible? And there’s still so much we don’t yet understand.”  
  
Lena wonders how she ever used to worry she’d become like Lex. It was time wasted, fears misplaced. She could never be like him. Hell, even _Lex_ is barely like Lex anymore. A Dementor may never have Kissed him, but his soul is gone anyway. “So you’re going to hit me with the torture curse, then?” she pries, gritting her teeth.  
  
Lex laughs. “If it was as easy as a single _crucio_ ,” – a few sparks shoot out of the end of his wand at the word – “you would’ve heard about this phenomenon long ago. No. It’s not enough pain. Do you not see, Lena, that I have brought two of my friends? My most powerful friends, at that. Now, come over here.”  
  
Lena smirks. She’s only been more scared than this once in her life, and that had been when Kara had jumped off the Tower after her, an effort to save Lena in which they both could’ve died. “What’s the magic word, Lex?”  
  
He starts, and for a second, she thinks he’s going to accidentally say _please._ But then he mutters an entirely different magic word, and an invisible force picks her up and hurls her to the ground at his feet. The rough landing hurts horribly, and she thinks that her arm might’ve fractured with the force of it. This position appears a little too much like begging for her taste, though, so she drags herself to her feet.  
  
Lex and his two cloaked accomplices form a triangle around her. “Have you ever done this before?” she asks, in the rather futile hope that somehow, they won’t pull it off, and her soul will be left intact.  
  
Lex rolls his eyes. “Lena, you’re my baby sister. Do you really think I’d experiment on you? Of course not. We had to practice a fair bit to perfect this, but I think it’s worth it, don’t you?”  
  
There’s a pause, and Lena tries to think of something to say, anything that would keep the conversation going long enough for the Aurors to find her. But she’s too slow, and suddenly the whole world echoes with three shouts of “ _Crucio!_ ”, and Lena is thrown up to hover in the air, then torn completely apart.  
  
It’s as if her every bone is shattering, every capillary exploding, every muscle twisting itself into oblivion. It’s so bad that it’s barely even pain anymore, just destruction, just torment, and anything would be better than this. She’d rather die, she’d rather die, she’d rather die.  
  
Then it’s like something impossibly hot is welling up inside her, and suddenly, it’s over.  
  
Not just the pain.  
  
Everything.  

///

The first sound that Lena is aware of, able to understand, is a loudspeaker announcement, a soft female voice, saying, “Welcome to St Mungo’s. You have found yourself on the fourth floor, which contains our wards for those suffering spell damage. Please proceed to the information desk.” It’s from far away, as if there is a wall between Lena and the noise.  
  
She tries to open her eyes, _can’t._ Tries to twitch her fingers, _can’t_. Tries to do anything but shallowly breathe and listen, _can’t._ She can feel what she thinks are bedsheets against her, but in a numb way, the equivalent of cracking radio static, the barest of distant sensations. Panic bleeds through her, but she doesn’t shiver, doesn’t gasp; nothing changes at all. She’s claustrophobic in her own skin, and there’s nothing she can do. It reminds her of the freezing charms her mother used to cast on her as punishment, but worse, a thousand times worse.  
  
“As you can see, no response to stimuli. Whatever Luthor did to her, she’s what the Muggles would call a coma patient. We have no way of knowing if she’s still in there. This body could simply be a shell.” That’s an unfamiliar voice, a clinical one, although it is hedged with sympathy.  
  
“She’s got a heartbeat; so how could she not be in there?” Chase, Lena’s thinks, but her memories seem too clouded for her to really be sure.  
  
“The human condition is never so simple as just dead or alive. We don’t know enough to even name her disorder, let alone treat it.”  
  
A hand comes to rest on her shoulder, but her perceptions are so dimmed that it feels like less than a warm breeze.    
  
“She’s, um…” Chase murmurs. “She’s got a girl, back home. What the hell do I tell her?”

///

Lena has no way of measuring how time passes. She just lies in the bed, like an unopened book: full to bursting with words and ideas, but completely untouched. Hours might’ve flown by since the doctor’s visit, or perhaps only minutes.  
  
“Hey, Lena,” Chase mutters, and her voice is closer than it was before, like she might be sitting down. “I don’t know if you can hear me, but on the off-chance that you can, I’m going to keep talking to you, okay? We didn’t get Lex. I’m sorry. By the time we’d fought our way out of the ambush, he was gone. We found you in the clearing about two miles away, and you’re in the hospital now. I’ve sent an owl to Danvers, back at the Ministry, and explained everything. About the trap, and you, and how we’re here now. Hopefully he’ll bring Kara to see you.”  
  
Lena can’t reply, but if she could, she’d say, _I hope so, too._

///

She can make out the clatter of footsteps, of hurriedly shouted names and other watery background noise. She’s almost sure that it’s Alex she can hear calling after Kara, and she misses her sight more than ever now. She hasn’t seen Kara in weeks, and even though she knows Kara will be just as beautiful (more beautiful, definitely more), she really, really wants to _look_ at her anyway. She’s itching to kiss her cheek and whisper her name and hug her tight, do all those wonderful, incredible things; the realest magic she’d found at Hogwarts. It hurts as badly as those torture curses to realise that she might have lost such luxuries forever.  
  
“Alex. Kara. Look, before I pull the curtain back – before you see her – I have to explain. She, um, she looks like she’s sleeping. But she isn’t.”  
  
“Is she dead?” Alex asks, and for someone whose voice is usually propped up by steel scaffolds, it’s impossibly shaky. “Or dying?”  
  
Chase takes a while to reply. “We don’t know. Lex did something to her. You can talk to her, if you want, but they don’t think she can hear you. The Healer said to make sure you understand that Lena probably won’t ever wake up. She’s still breathing and her heart’s still beating, but… she’s gone.”  
  
Kara starts to cry. It’s so soft that anyone else might think that the tears sliding down her cheeks are silent, but Lena’s spent enough nights pressed close to her while she drowned in bad dreams not to be able to place those soft, gasping breaths anywhere.  
  
But then something else happens. Something that Lena doesn’t expect.  
  
Kara gets mad.  
  
“How could you _do_ this to her!” she shouts, her voice rough and torn, and Lena can only imagine the way her face has crumpled. “Dad says you were baiting Lex. She’s _sixteen_ , Chase. I thought you were supposed to keep her safe! I thought that I could _trust_ you!”  
  
“Kara, I -”  
  
“And _why_ didn’t she tell me? Didn’t you let her?”  
  
“No. No. She chose not to,” Chase explains. Lena would wince if she had any motor function at all. She’d been planning to explain everything to Kara face to face, hopefully with Lex back in Azkaban, when she’d be able to see that Lena’s risk – her _lie_ – was worth it.  
  
“Why?” Kara whispers, and it’s as if the word’s backbone is broken.  
  
“She, uh, she wanted you to be safe. That’s all she ever wanted.” The _that’s why she did this in the first place_ isn’t said, but Lena hears it all the same, and she’s sure that Kara does, too.  
  
“Let me see her, please,” Kara begs, “I need to see her. I need -”  
  
“Okay. Just. Deep breath, okay?”  
  
There’s footsteps, and the rattling sound of the curtain rail sliding back. Lena’s stomach swoops in that way it always has around Kara, and her heart starts to race; it’s the most she’s felt since she’s woken up.  
  
There’s a gentle intake of breath from Kara, and then a hand cups her cheek, a thumb sweeping over the ridged bone. The contact is warm and real and Lena’s nerves are on fire, because she _feels_ it. The rasp of the bed sheets, the pressure of Chase’s grip earlier, they were dissonant, as if they happened to someone else.  
  
But Kara’s fingers on her skin registers in every cell, all the way down to her bones.  
  
Awareness of the sensation ripples through her consciousness, like being shaken while deeply asleep.  
  
“She’s going to wake up,” Kara murmurs. “She will. She will.”  
  
“Kara.” That’s Alex, Lena can tell, even though her voice has lost its anchor. “You can’t know that. I know you want her back. I know you love her, but -”  
  
“You’re not _listening_ to me,” Kara interrupts her, the fierceness from earlier bubbling back to the surface. “I’ve seen this before. Being dead and alive.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“In my colony, before the war. I was four, and one of my friends got hit by a Muggle car when we went into the town. He screamed so loud, and even though they healed him, he stayed in this weird kind of sleep. Like Lena.” A hand cards through her hair, pushing it away from Lena’s face. “My mother explained to me that it was a kind of raw magic, like the sort we use to fly. The magic in us, the wild stuff we can’t really control, sometimes, it tries to save us, hides us in ourselves to  
protect us from the world. It keeps you there until you’re safe again. But sometimes, it keeps you forever.”  
  
Chase sighs, as if the air in her lungs weighs a thousand pounds. “Kara, sweetie, I know you want to fix this. I know. But if you were right, she would’ve woken up by now. She’s safe _here._ She’s surrounded by Aurors in a hospital.”  
  
“No, you’re _wrong_.” The sheet tugs, and Lena imagines that Kara’s fist has clenched in it. “She can’t just _know_ that she’s safe. Logic isn’t more powerful than raw magic. The little boy, in my colony, he was asleep for months. They eventually decided to move him to a permanent resting place, and someone put his favourite soft toy with his body. A little giraffe. And when it touched him, his hand twitched. It took weeks, but eventually, the magic let go of him. My mother said that it has to be something deep in your brain like that, something innocent, completely untouchable.”  
  
After a few moments, Alex says, “Kara, Lena’s childhood was… hard. She doesn’t have a stuffed giraffe, or anything like that. Her mother’s cold. Her father’s dead. Lex is the one who did this to her. She’s got nothing to bring her back.”  
  
Kara groans in frustration. “No, Alex. There’s _got_ to be something. Whatever it is, we can find it. We will. We can look everywhere, right, Alex?”  
  
“Right,” Alex agrees, but is sounds like what you say to someone who’s lost everything, the comforting lie you wrap them in so they don’t fall apart. Kara might’ve been Lena’s Saviour Vine, but she’s pretty sure that Alex was Kara’s.  
  
Kara’s next whisper is shattered. “You two don’t believe me, do you?”  
  
“I think that when the alternative is accepting that you’ve lost one of the most important people in your life, you’ll believe anything,” Chase tells her. “You need time, Kara. I’m going to go get your dad, he’s still talking with the Healer, all right?”  
  
Kara holds her hand, and she thinks that Alex’s hand is on her knee, and she wishes so hard that she could open her eyes, see them, reach out and touch them. But she can’t.  
  
After what feels like not time at all, Mr Danvers arrives to pry his daughters away. “Visiting hours are over, girls. We have to go. I’m sorry.”  
  
“Dad, we can’t just _leave_ her here,” Kara says, and her grip on Lena’s fingers tightens.  
  
“We can’t stay, honey. I promise I’ll bring you back tomorrow, as soon as it’s allowed, okay? And the day after. For the rest of the summer, if we have to.”  
  
A kiss is pressed to Lena’s forehead. “I’ll miss you,” Kara whispers in her ear, a handful of breathy syllables, just for her.  
  
Lena wants desperately to pull Kara into a proper kiss. To press their mouths together and bite her lip and kiss down her neck until she can feel nothing but Kara, instead of just nothing.

///

Lena might sleep, but seeing as it really isn’t all that different from being awake now, she has no way to be sure. Eventually, the Danvers come back within earshot, and she hangs on their every word, her whole world reduced to sound. Kara talks to her softly, telling her about the summer so far and stories from her childhood and recounting moments from their time at Hogwarts, as if she knows Lena is listening.  
  
Alex reads out the latest Quidditch scores and rants a bit about the players, partly, Lena suspects, to humour Kara, but also to allow herself the luxury of belief.  
  
Kara adds that Winn and James will be coming to visit soon, and probably Jess and the girls from her Slytherin dorm. Lena remembers being at St Mungo’s at age ten, laid out with some terrible virus, when no one sat at her bedside. Every so often, it hits her like a ton of bricks how much everything has changed. For the better.  
  
The hours flicker by, though, the air slowly getting colder, and then the Danvers have to leave again. Kara leaves her Hufflepuff scarf with Lena. It’s soft and smells like vanilla, the way the Hogwarts kitchens did when they’d sneak in to eat cookies when they were little. It makes her feel a little less alone after they depart.

///  
  
The next day, Winn and James do indeed spend the day with her, arguing so loudly about the merits of Muggle sports versus Quidditch that she’s surprised the sheer volume doesn’t yank her out of wherever Lex’s curses have forced her to hide. Kara’s there, too, but she’s more subdued. Lena’s hands ache to slide around her in a hug, to comfort her, but if she could do that, Kara wouldn’t be sad in the first place.  
  
A little after James announces it to be one in the afternoon (he’s taken to narrating what’s happening in the hospital around them, updating her, feeding her imagination enough that it’s almost like she can sense again), a Healer stops by.  
  
“Hi, kids, is Ms Luthor’s parent or guardian here?” It could be a cheerful greeting, but every attempt at optimism on the fourth floor falls short. They’re all chronic, here, people too damaged by life for even death to claim them.  
  
“No,” Kara mutters darkly. “Why?”  
  
“We need to discuss more permanent arrangements for the patient. She’s showed no signs of improvement, and there’s no indication that she ever will, so we want to move her to the Longbottom Ward for Unchangeable Chases.”  
  
“She’s not _the patient,_ she’s Lena,” Winn snaps. “And you can’t move her. She’s only been here a few days. Unexpected things happen all the time.”  
  
“I’ve been a Healer for decades, buddy. People like her – magic like that – we can’t fix everything. All you can do is make them comfortable, and wait for some kind of ending.”  
  
“Her mother, she’s… You can’t talk to her about Lena. She won’t make good decisions,” Kara tells him, almost panicked. “She doesn’t care about Lena, not like she should.”  
  
“It’s not about what we should do. It’s the law. I’m sorry. I’ll send her the paperwork by owl,” the Healer announces, and Lena’s heart sinks.  
  
As soon as his footsteps fade into the distance, Kara explains her theory about Lena’s condition to the boys, telling them about the kid from her colony, and how the toy brought him back. “There’s got to be something that’s stronger than magic for her. That makes her feel safe. We just have to get it.”  
  
“We can go pick up her school trunk,” James offers. “Everything important she owns is in there. Whatever it is that’ll bring her back to us, it’s going to be inside.”  
  
An hour later, Alex and Maggie come by to hang out with them until an attendant comes by and shoos them all out.

///

Lena must’ve gone to sleep, because she’s definitely woken by Kara’s voice.  
  
“Hey, babe, I’m back. I know it’s not visiting hours, but hopefully none of the Healers will come by.” There’s a pause, where Lena ought to reply, but both of them know that she won’t, she can’t. “I flew here, if that’s what you’re wondering. Through the window.”  
  
Kara chatters on for a while, and Lena thinks about how much she loves her, her best friend, her girlfriend. Thinks about being eleven years old, staring out the train window, and not knowing that the bright-eyed girl who knocked on the door would change her entire life, would change _her._ Lex can curse her to hell and back, but nothing can take that away. Even if she never wakes up, she’s got enough memories to live in.  
  
Eventually, as they must, Kara’s words become slower, slurred, mumbled, and she drifts off to sleep. Her head tips gently onto Lena’s stomach as she slips into unconsciousness, her hair spilling about her, falling into Lena’s motionless fingers. It’s soft and even though she can’t see it, she knows exactly what it looks like.  
  
Her head fills with recollections, of moments long past. Carding her fingers through it on the shore by the lake, after exams in their first year. The way it flew around Kara’s face when she raced to meet Lena on the platform after a summer apart. Kara running her hands through it as Lena whispered about her nightmares. Watching it blow in the wind as they fell from the Tower. Tangling her fingers in it as she pushed Kara against the door of the broom cupboard, kissing her like she’d slip away if Lena didn’t. Millions of minutes spent with Kara, a hand holding hers, leading her out of the Luthor darkness, an anchor that allowed new roots to grow, _home_. Her whole body wracks with warmth, and the last thing she felt this much and this deeply was pain, but hasn’t that always been the way? Lex breaking her, and Kara holding tightly to the pieces until Lena can put herself back together again?

 _Safe._  
  
Her hand  _moves_ , tightens around the blonde locks draped over her fingers.   
  
///

Coming back to life happens achingly slowly.  
  
For the first few days, she can barely wiggle extremities, and the slightest shift of a toe takes mammoth effort. But something within her has changed, the magic has shifted, and she no longer feels as trapped. There is nothing to save her from now, and one day, she will wake up. After a week, she can move her hand enough to properly hold Kara’s. After two, she can open her eyes. Not all the way. But she can make out a blurry outline of her girlfriend, so that’s the greatest thing to happen in about forever. By halfway through the summer, Lena still can’t talk, can’t really walk, but she can sit up, move her hands, and when Kara gently kisses her one night, she can kiss back.

///

James lives close by the hospital, and comes in every morning with snacks and his wizarding wireless so they can listen to the commentary of the Quidditch games as the teams battle it out to determine who will play the World Cup.

Winn visits whenever he can, often accompanied by some small Muggle electronic device that they disassemble and scrutinise together, he hypothesising on how it could be improved, her attempting to communicate to a series of gestures how much she disagrees with him. Kara brings board games, books, and even her wand, which the Aurors discovered discarded in the same clearing in the woods that they found her. She’s there every day, from the beginning to end of visiting hours without fail, and sneaking back at night a few times a week.

When she’s not there, Lena practices the abilities she’s yet to regain. Attempting to speak feels like shredding her larynx, but she works on producing rough phonetics, vowels and consonants, building up from lonely syllables to whole words.

///

“Hey,” Kara says, smiling as soon as she enters the ward. “How’s it going?”  
  
Lena waves for her to come closer, and she sinks down onto the edge of the mattress, adjusting her glasses, eyes bright. Lena leans up, and whispers into Kara’s ear, “I love you.” She’s sure it sounds horribly rough, but she’s been working on the words for ages now, and she couldn’t really wait.  
  
Kara gasps softly, and Lena will never know if it’s at the words, or the fact that she’s managed to say them at all. They’ve said _I love you_ before, but as friends, and that’s not the way Lena means it this time. At least, not the only way.  
  
“I love you, too,” Kara breathes back, and Lena knows – _knows_ – that the last of the magic hiding her away must have let go by now.

///

“Lex must know that I’m still alive, still _me_ ,” Lena tells Chase. It’s just the two of them, because Kara refuses to speak to the Auror these days, so she’s gone to get a hot chocolate, armed with Lena’s promise not to agree to any _completely stupid and life-endangering_ plans while she’s gone.  
  
Chase nods. “He’s got sources everywhere. But we can’t use you like that again. You don’t deserve it, and he’d probably see it coming from a mile off, anyway. We’ll have to figure out something else, I guess. Just keep trying.”  
  
“If you ever need me -” Lena begins, in her new, low, scratchy voice, but she’s cut off.  
  
“No. You’re done. Benched, as the Muggles say. I’m not going to ask you to do anything, never again.”  
  
“He’s my brother. I’m a Luthor, and that means -”  
  
“No, you’re _Lena._ And that means going to Hogwarts, hanging out with your girlfriend, and going to the Three Broomsticks with your friends. Just be safe, okay?”  
  
“Okay.”

///

Finally, at the end of August, the Healers at St Mungo’s declare her to be fit to return home. Lena doesn’t exactly know what that means – the mansion? Kara’s place? Hogwarts? – but she’s excited to leave. She’s seen enough of the inside of the fourth floor ward to last her about ten lifetimes.  
  
To her surprise, it’s Alex who comes to pick her up. “Hey, Lena.” She must seem surprised, because the eldest Danvers quickly explains, “Mum and Dad were gonna let you stay with them, but I thought it might be hard for you, seeing as you’re dating Kara now, and I know you still have trouble trusting adults not to flip out at you. So I figured you could come stay with me until school starts? It’s only a week till term anyway, and I promise not to notice if you sneak out.” Alex winks at her, and Lena grins.

///

Lena falls asleep on the Hogwarts Express, even though she looks forward to those hours crammed into a tiny compartment with her friends, because it reminds her of such humble beginnings. But she gets tired easier these days, and it’s barely starting to go dark before she drifts off. Kara’s hand is in hers, and she can hear Winn and James joking in the background, and everything’s okay.  
  
When she wakes, her arm is numb, and instead of realising it’s just pins and needles, she’s overcome with panic, terrified to slip back inside the recesses of her mind. It takes all three of them to calm her down again, but she doesn’t really feel better until all sensation returns to overthrow the numbness.

///

At the Sorting, she cheers for every kid, no matter what house they end up in, but especially loud for those who get placed in Slytherin. She remembers how scared she used to be of it, and how grateful she is now for her ambition. Ambition to not let go of good things, ambition to be better, to make friends, to change her life. Ambition to grow into herself and come back from how Lex had cursed her away. She looks at the tiny eleven-year-olds stumbling nervously over to their table and sees kids who will not rest until they become something.  
  
She glances up, and makes eye contact with Kara at the next table over, who is hugging the newest Hufflepuff.  
  
Yeah, nothing you want more than anything is ever out of reach.

///

Donovan is the captain of their Quidditch team this year, and at first she’s worried that things will be odd between them, given he asked her out before the summer. But when she arrives at the training shed, he taps her gently on the shoulder with his bat, and grins.

“Heard that you beat the shit out of a deadly curse,” he crows.  
  
“Heard right,” she smirks back, and then they set about dealing with the fact that their team currently consists of themselves and one fifth year chaser, everyone else having graduated.

///

She and Kara share a free period three afternoons of the week, right after Care of Magical Creatures. When they’re comparing time tables on the first day of term, they decide to allocate the time to study, declaring that they can never be too ahead of the homework. This transpires to be horribly naïve of them, because they do _not_ use the time for anything resembling school work at all. In fact, the only test Lena could pass as a result of those hours would be one on exactly how to kiss Kara’s neck if you want her to moan.

///

“I want to start a school newspaper,” Kara announces as they walk out of their Transfiguration class.  
  
Lena smiles encouragingly, even though she has absolutely no idea what her girlfriend could possibly write about. Their school isn’t exactly scandal central, but she’s sure people would read it, because, well, it’s Kara, and her Quidditch commentary is the stuff of legend even among the kids who’ve yet to hear it. “Why?”  
  
“Well, remember how I was telling you that I might want to be a reporter?”

Lena usually pays attention to everything Kara says, but she’s fairly sure that this particular discussion had occurred while Kara was wearing that really cute dress last weekend, and Lena had been the slightest bit distracted. “Um, yeah. Yes. Definitely.”

Kara gives her a curious look, but she’s not called out. “Right. Well, I want to practice. Get some experience, you know?”  
  
“That sounds like a great idea, Kara,” she smiles, because it does, and she’s proud.  
  
“Awesome! Now I just have to figure out how to get started.”  
  
The answer to that particular problem turns out to be Lena glaring at a lot of people from behind Kara’s head, and eventually Kara’s charm wearing away at Professor Grant until she promises that she’ll print the paper.

///

“Figured out what you want to do after school yet?” Winn pries, nudging her gently. They’re lying on the Quidditch field under the stars, because today’s the anniversary of when his father killed six people, and neither of them expect him to sleep tonight. Every year on this day, ever since they were twelve, they hide out someplace and talk until dawn, about the horrible families they came from and the amazing ones that they’ve built for themselves.  
  
“No,” Lena mumbles. “I feel like everyone else has, though. Kara’s going to write for the Daily Prophet. James is going to Keep for England, or do something with his camera. Jess is going to work in the wizarding embassy in America. All I ever wanted was be the good Luthor, to fix my name, and that’s not exactly something I can tell Professor Grant at our careers meeting.”  
  
Winn gazes at her carefully, as if predicting her response to his next statement. “Well, I was thinking. About that book of ideas that you have, for Muggle and wizarding technology. You could make something from that. Build those things. They’d change everything. You’d be a household name in a couple of years, and for the reasons _you_ want, _you_ choose, not Lex. I want to work for the Auror department in the Ministry eventually – don’t give me that look, L, I didn’t mean as a field agent – but I could help you, if you’d like, to get off the ground.”  
  
She stares up at the stars. “You and me, bringing the wizarding and Muggle worlds together.”  
  
“Sounds like the tagline for one of those movie things,” Winn jokes, and they laugh.  
  
It’s as if the shadows of the people who hurt them in their lives sit on the grass of the Quidditch pitch around them, but they’re getting easier to ignore as the years go by. Now, their future selves are lying nearby, too, even though they can’t see them. They’ll probably meet up on this night every year, always suffer the weight of where they came from, but it’s been a lot lighter since that day by the lake, when two eleven year olds agreed in the sunlight to not follow in such tragic footsteps.

///

In her potions class (in which there’s no Kara, for the first time in six years), the professor, perhaps to encourage them to pursue careers in alchemy, shows them a bizarre array of complicated potions. While all the concoctions are arguably equally dangerous and exciting, the one that gets the class vibrating with intrigue is the Amortentia. Lena doesn’t have to go up to the cauldron to know what it will smell like, but she joins the queue of her peers anyway. When it’s her turn, she breathes in the scent of salt, the heavy kind that swills about the ocean in summer; the rich, dark, kind of earth that forests grow in; and strongest of all, the vanilla-and-honey essence that’s unmistakeably Kara. Of course.

///

The Quidditch team she and Donovan end up with after some rather extensive try-outs consists mostly of players in their fourth and fifth years. While this is not exactly unusual – and greatly resembles the team when she joined it in her second year – everyone looks rather young, and she’s given the distinct impression of herding cats.

They do acquire one second year player (a very fast new chaser) who is incredibly shy off the pitch, and for some reason decides that Lena is the least-scary person in Hogwarts. Despite usually being totally silent, he’ll hug her and say hi in corridors, come up to her at breakfast to chat, and occasionally tugs her down to the field to help him practice. Before their first game, he explains to her that loud noises sometimes make him _shut down_ , in something like what the Muggles call a sensory overload. She casts a dampening spell on his ears before the game, and promises that if he feels even the slightest bit uncomfortable, they’ll forfeit and go sit someplace quiet in the castle.  
  
He plays like a champion, and Lena is far prouder about that than she is about their victory.

///

“You know you borrowed that on the second day because you were cold, right?” Lena smirks, tugging gently on her Slytherin scarf, which is draped loosely about Kara’s neck. It’s been in her girlfriend’s custody for over a month now.  
  
Kara shrugs. “What if I’m still cold?” she grins.  
  
“We’re inside. Sitting next to a fire.”  
  
“I’m freezing.”  
  
“Okay.” It’s not as if Lena would ever take it back; Kara likes it too much, so she’ll just have to work on the instinct that bubbles up every time she sees the blonde wearing it. The one that begs her to say, _hey, maybe we should go check out that broom cupboard on the sixth floor._

///

James and Lucy break up in an incredibly dramatic fashion in the courtyard, with a cloud of younger students eagerly watching the senior drama. As best as Lena can determine, the catalyst has been James spending too much time training for Quidditch, and barely any at all with her.  
  
“We have to -” Kara begins.  
  
“Kara, we can’t. They need to sort this out themselves, and if we interrupt, it’s not going to solve anything.” Lena firmly believes that their separation will last no less than two class periods, and no more than a week. If they intervene now, the repressed problems that started the fight will simmer below the surface, and they’ll be back in the courtyard having another knock-down-drag-out by the end of November.  
  
Kara pouts. “I want to help them fix it.”  
  
“Some things you can only fix on your own,” Lena says, and she knows it better than most people. The more she thinks about the situation, though the more uncomfortable she gets, because she’s never really thought about break-ups before. But if James and Lucy can, then what’s to stop –  
  
Kara kisses her quickly as soon as they’re alone in the corridor, and she folds that fear up and stows it away in the back of her mind.

///

Lena has nightmares about being locked in her own body at least a couple of times a week. She doesn’t tell anyone, because what could she say? It’s hard to explain how her nightmares have _nothing_ in them. She still thinks that she’s dealing with it all fairly well, though, until the day that someone hits her with a freezing curse during a DEO meeting. It’s an easy spell, but since their little club has been filled with new, younger members since the old ones graduated, they’re starting back at basics. When the third year’s shout of _petrificus totalis_ renders her completely immobile, though, she immediately starts to panic, and the waves of anxiety don’t stop even after Kara unfreezes her and quietly takes her out into the abandoned hallway.

She feels like she’s choking, suffocating with the idea of becoming a shell again. Every time she thinks she’s beaten Lex, evaded him, but he always manages to win somehow.  
  
“Come on, Lena,” Kara murmurs, her palms warm and dancing gentle, identical circles across Lena’s back. “Breathe, okay?” She whispers her through inhaling and exhaling until Lena can mostly do it on her own, and then they go through Lena’s senses, proving to her that they’re all still working, and then hundreds of tiny movements to affirm her motor control.  
  
“I can’t believe that just happened,” Lena groans, once her heart rate has settled and the worst of the panic has fled.  
  
Kara’s grip tightens on her hand. “Lena, what Lex did to you was… terrible. You don’t always get better from things like that just because you heal. I used to get panic attacks when I was little, when I was first adopted by the Danvers. Alex would take me to the beach and we’d breathe and listen to the waves for ages until I felt all right again.”

///

Alex sends Winn and Lena a small, cheap cell phone, as per their request, and they begin to experiment on it in the free period they have after Muggle Studies.

It takes them ages, but once they understand the theory behind the device, they set about building their own version. It relies on a tiny electric spark and a minute pinch of Floo powder, so they can transport a voice or a note instead of a body.

They test it all around the castle, and their promising test results lead Winn to only one conclusion: “We’re geniuses! Heck yeah!”  
  
“Winn, you’re sixteen, you can probably say _hell yeah_ ,” James laughs.

///

Lena’s kissing her way down Kara’s neck in the slight darkness of the broom cupboard, listening to the slight, gasping sounds of her girlfriend’s breath. It’s good – it’s _great_ – until Lena’s hands accidentally get really, properly brave and slide under Kara’s shirt. She jerks them away instantly, stumbling back a few paces, mumbling apologies. They’ve always gone slow, and she doesn’t want to make Kara uncomfortable, and -  
  
“Lena, it’s okay,” Kara whispers, pulling her back by her green and silver tie. “It’s more than okay.”

///

Around the end of December, a horrible flu blows through the castle, and drags what feels like half the student population to the infirmary. Lena spends the weekend hanging out by Kara’s bed, and on Monday, quietly skips a few classes to return.  
  
“Wait. Don’t you have Muggle Studies right now?” Kara asks. She looks pale and tired and Lena itches to hug her, touch her, lie down next to her, but if she does any of those things, she knows the matron will have her kicked out in a heartbeat, shrieking, _don’t you know what contagious means, Miss Luthor?_ (It’s happened once or twice before).  
  
“Um. No.”  
  
Kara glares at her and wow, since when does she do that? “Are you skipping?”  
  
“Kara, it’s Muggle Studies. It’s not like it’s -”  
  
“You should go.”  
  
She probably should. But she won’t. “Look, how about we just pretend that you’re a Muggle, and I’ll study you?” Lena offers, smirking. It’s a pretty weak joke, but she’s rewarded with a laugh anyway.

“You should’ve saved that pick up line for when I was well,” Kara smiles.  
  
Lena shrugs. “I’m pretty sure you’ll still kiss me, even if I don’t have smooth moves.”  
  
Kara raises an eyebrow, and it’s probably far less intimidating and far more adorable than she means it to be. “How sure, exactly?”  
  
Lena pretends to calculate her odds. “Well, what if I smuggle you in some chocolate frogs, would that boost my chances?”  
  
“Absolutely.”

///

She can tell that Kara misses Alex. They’ve never been at Hogwarts without the eldest Danvers there, and while Kara may not strictly _need_ her, her sibling is such a central part of Kara’s life that letters don’t really compare to having her only a few corridors away.  
  
Lena secretly organises for Alex to meet them in Hogsmeade on one of the weekends, and leaves the two of them to have their mile-a-minute conversations in peace, heading to the Three Broomsticks to join Winn and James.  
  
She imagines, briefly, arranging to see Lex here, listening to him complain light-heartedly about his Ministry job, buying her a Butterbeer, and asking about classes.  
She hates her brother, she does, but she doesn’t think she’ll ever not miss the version of him she wishes existed.  
  
“Well, you’re adopted, aren’t you? Maybe you have biological siblings,” James comments to Lena casually, and it's innocent and off-handed, but the idea lodges irreparably in her brain. There’s no way of finding her actual parents – Lena strongly suspects that they aren’t even alive anymore – but it’s a nice thought, imagining little kids with her hair or eyes or nose, running about somewhere in the world.

///

Lena laughs. “You’re an idiot. I love you.”  
  
Kara, looking up from where she’s creating a defence line of wizarding chess pieces around Wiggles’ food so Caddy won’t eat it, grins back. “I love you, too. Duh.”

///

James is truly awful at Apparating, it transpires. It comes naturally to Lena – she spent much of her early life trying to disappear, anyway – but the Gryffindor consistently manages to leave at least one essential limb behind on every attempt. This fact amuses Winn no end, and he delights in having found one physical exercise in which he can best his friend.

///

Professor Henshaw finally manages to drag her into facing a boggart after one of the DEO sessions. They venture into his office, and he stands behind her, hand resting on her shoulder, as they stare down the rattling cupboard.  
  
“Now, when Lex steps out, you need to be focused, and calm. Recite the incantation, and he’ll disappear,” he instructs.  
  
“I can do it,” Lena promises, knuckles white around her wand. The professor nods, and with a muttered charm, the clanking doors separating them from the creature swing open.  
  
Her brother does not appear. Instead, Kara’s body – bloody, pale, broken – tumbles limply out of the wardrobe to lie unmoving on the carpet floor.  
  
Logically, Lena knows that Kara is currently on her way back to the Hufflepuff common room with Winn and James to tackle that Transfiguration essay, but right now, it is this version – this _dead_ version – of Kara that seems real.  
  
“No, no, no, no,” Lena mumbles, and she can feel her body start to shut down the way it did when Lex cursed her, the way it does during a panic attack. Like she’s folding in on herself.  
  
Professor Henshaw moves so that he’s in front of her, and the boggart instead begins to transform into some large, hulking, white-skinned creature that he banishes quickly.  
  
“Are you okay?” he asks gently.  
  
Lena closes her eyes. Still sees it. “No.” But she’ll go find Kara, kiss her, hold her hand, remind herself that she’s alive and – eventually, she will be.

///

Chase barely writes to her at all about Lex. The developments are nothing, nothing, nothing. No bodies, no trail. Her brother might not have ever existed at all. After months of inactivity, the Daily Prophet begins to speculate that he’s died, killed off in some secret duel.  
  
“They might be right,” Kara suggests gently, eyes searching Lena’s face.  
  
“They’re not. I’d know. I’d feel it,” she argues. She’s sure he’s still out there.  
  
“Lena, babe, he -”  
  
“He doesn’t just get to _disappear_. How am I ever supposed to sleep if I don’t _know_ for _sure_? Kara, ten years could go by and I’d still worry that he’s biding his time,”  
  
Lena whispers, and it takes a mammoth effort to expel those worries from her lungs.  
  
Kara presses a kiss to her temple. “They’ll find him, all right? Dead or alive.”  
  
Lena wraps an arm around her waist. She doesn’t need anything more than that, anything more than absolution. Everything else will heal with time.

///

The school year disappears so fast, it could’ve Apparated away.  
  
Easter flies by in a mess of chocolate and enchanting bunnies to hop after various friends on their way to class.  
  
Exams hurry past them in a whirlwind of stress and a flurry of coffee-stained note pages.  
  
After their final test (Transfiguration), they lie on the shore of the lake, throwing toast onto the water’s surface to lure out the giant squid.  
  
“Isn’t it insane that we only have one year left?” Winn sighs out. “Can you believe that we’ve been here _six years_?”  
  
Lena thinks about how she used to drown in the iron cloak of her name, how lonely she used to be, how bitter and guarded and sad, too nervous to love anything for fear of it slipping away. Then she stares at the three of them: Winn, eating the toast meant for the squid; James sewing up a hole in his Keeping glove, a frown of fierce concentration on his face; and Kara, currently re-tying Lena’s tie because her own hands are too wet from the lake to do it. She kisses her girlfriend quickly, and though it makes Kara ruin the knot completely, she decides it’s more than worth it.  
  
Everything is different, everything is good. She's come so far.  
  
So yeah, she can believe it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @teamsupercorp on tumblr, come talk to me :P


	7. the seventh year (part i)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so this has been extended from 7 chapters to 8. again, a lot of these scenes are previously untried territory, so sorry if they lack cohesion. hope you enjoy part 1 of year seven!

“I know that you’re going home, but if you need it, you’ve always got a place with me,” Alex tells her, as they’re all leaving King’s Cross, walking out into the sunlight.  
  
Lena nods. “Thanks, Alex. But I have to go back. You know, for the last time.”

She isn’t sure how to explain that she wants to revisit her past as the version of herself that she is now. That she needs to look at everything she used to fear and let it wash over her, before folding it up and placing it in a cardboard box marked ‘miscellaneous’ in the back of her mind, and leaving it to collect dust. Closure, or whatever they call it. The coming year will be full of endings, and the first ending has to be this one.  
  
They’re surrounded by parents, so instead of getting to kiss Kara goodbye like she wants to, she hugs her, and presses her lips quickly to Kara’s cheek. It’s not much, but it’s enough to hang onto until the next time they’re together.  
  
Kara always does this thing where she squeezes her just a little bit tighter right before she lets go, and maybe that seems like a pointless detail, but it isn’t to Lena.

///

The Luthor mansion is different, these days. Not that anything’s actually changed – the walls are that same oppressive grey, the rooms like ancient mausoleums – but the grip that this place used to have on her is gone. She is no longer under the thumb of her mother and a second-hand legacy. Lena’s barely even been into her room in three years, and when she returns there on the first day of the summer, she’s struck by how small it seems.  
  
No one’s gone in, of course, and nothing’s been touched; it’s exactly as she left it the last time she spent any real time here, back when she was fourteen. She can almost see her younger self sitting listlessly on the edge of the bed, staring at the ceiling, wishing away the time until the start of term, wondering if Kara could ever like her back. All that is somehow both yesterday and a millennium ago. Lena thinks that a part of her will surely always be that lost child, but she’s glad of it, because it gives her a contrast to stand next to herself now – so much braver, taller, happier, stronger.  
  
In two weeks, she’s got the Apparition test, and if she passes, she will never be anchored to this house again. Sure, she’ll still sleep here, most nights, but she’ll finally be free. She’ll be officially of age, and the little girl who haunts these corridors – the one who sat in silence next to distant parents, who was left frozen in hallways, who couldn’t sleep unless the door was locked – well, Lena imagines she will gently fade away.

///

Lillian is god-knows-where most of the time these days, and while that’s certainly suspicious, it does mean that for the first time, Lena can use owl post. There’s no one to intercept her letters, and so even though she can’t go see Kara yet, writing her means that she doesn’t feel nearly so far away.

///

Her seventeenth birthday means the wizarding government officially recognises her as an adult. She wants to rub her wrists with the feeling of shackles falling off; Lillian’s grip cannot crush her anymore, can’t even reach her.

///

She aces the Apparition exam, and the instructor smiles at her as he hands her a brand new license.

“Congratulations, Ms Luthor, a flawless performance. Incredible accuracy.” He chuckles. “You’re officially registered with the Ministry. Off you go. With skills like yours, you could head anywhere in England right now.”

She thanks him, and maybe he’s right the entire country is fair game, but there’s only one place she wants to go.

///

Kara’s out on the beach when she materialises around the back of the Danvers’ home. She’s staring out at the ocean, and Lena takes advantage of the fact that she hasn’t been noticed yet to memorise the view. Her girlfriend, blonde hair tangling in the wind, swathed in the colours of the sand and the sky. It’s like being slammed with a stunning spell, sometimes, these heartbeats where it really _hits_ her, exactly how impossibly lucky she is.  
  
“Hey,” she calls out softly, and can’t help but smle as Kara starts a little, then squeaks, leaping up and it’s only a few seconds before Lena’s got an armful of blonde sixteen-year-old. Lena focuses on the feeling of Kara’s face pressed into her neck, the grate against her palms of the sand that’s still stuck to her t-shirt, and the smell of the sea.  
  
“I’m so happy to see you,” Kara murmurs, the words making her lips brush against Lena’s skin, and she can’t help but shiver. “I take it you passed your test, then?”  
  
Lena pulls back, just enough to tuck an adventurous lock of Kara’s hair behind her ear and find those bright eyes. “Yep. I was super accurate. The instructor was very impressed with me,” she brags jokingly.  
  
“I bet,” Kara murmurs, and then they’re kissing. Lena feels like she could sigh out an entire sky, bursting with that burning, overflowing sensation that only comes when she’s this close to Kara. Like her brain is turning itself inside out, and the whole world could disappear into a vacuum, and she wouldn’t notice.  
  
Lena’s hands slide down to her girlfriend’s hips, thumbs carefully sweeping small circles on smooth skin. Kara is apparently particularly brave today, because soft hands on her shoulders tug Lena even closer (which is impressive, considering there’s already no space between them), and does that thing with her tongue that makes Lena’s knees go almost embarrassingly weak.  
  
“You know that – mm – your parents could look out the window at literally any – _ah_ – second, right?” Lena mumbles in between kisses.  
Kara leans back slightly – not far, though, because they’ve been apart too long for Lena to even consider letting go of her just yet. “So let’s go somewhere else, then.”  
  
She thinks about all the places she’d love to take Kara – the lake in Germany where she learned to swim, that bakery in London, the library that they hid in back in Paris years ago. “I wish I could take you somewhere amazing. But… I’m too afraid of Splinching to go anywhere far,” Lena admits, her fingers twisting in the fabric of Kara’s shirt.  
  
“Okay,” Kara smiles. “We can hang out here, babe, alright?” She’s never asked Lena to do anything that she isn’t ready for, not in their whole lives, and while maybe there’s a few things that Lena’s not confident enough for yet, there is one thing that it’s time to share with Kara.  
  
“I do – I do have somewhere I want us to go, though,” Lena says, and once she’s got a nod from Kara and a secure grip on her precious cargo, she Apparates them.

///

“Are – are you okay?” Lena asks as soon as they’ve materialised, hoping desperately that she hasn’t accidentally left some of Kara behind. It’s extremely unlikely, but the possibility alone is enough to make her skin itch with worry.  
  
Kara opens her eyes. “I’m fine. All accounted for.” At Lena’s still-sceptical look, she offers, “You can check if you like.” Technically, it’s an assurance, but the tone and the look in Kara’s eyes make Lena choke on air at the implication.  
  
Luckily, she is saved from awkwardly sputtering over syllables, because Kara’s turned her gaze from Lena to their surroundings. “Are we -”  
  
“Yeah. This is – um – my room,” Lena informs her, leaning back against the wall as Kara turns to take in a place she’s only ever heard of. She doesn’t touch anything, but Lena can understand the urge to keep your hands behind your back here – it seems like a museum, sparse and minimalistic, nothing personal or soft enough to reach out for.  
  
Kara’s bedroom is full of art and photos and colourful decorations, built of her personality, whereas Lena’s is made of negative space, much more defined by what is missing than what she has.  
  
“I hate it here,” she adds, and even though it’s not news, Kara still stiffens. “Not, like, the walls and the stuff, so much, but I hate who I was here. Who they made me into.”  
  
“I loved that you, too. I’ve always loved you, every version, even if you didn’t,” Kara swears, twisting back into Lena’s arms. “But I am so glad you get to leave this behind.”  
  
It’s not just what she’s walking away from, though, it’s also what she’s heading towards. Like building tech with Winn. Like going to James’ Quidditch games. Like Kara. “I never thought you’d be here, you know,” Lena tells her, tilting back to rest against the wall again, but this time, gently pulling Kara with her. They’re pressed close, and it’s warm and safe and also a little bit distracting. “It’s kind of strange. Good strange, but… it’s like cutting someone out of a magazine and sticking them in an old picture. Everything’s always been so separate and now it’s starting to overlap.”  
  
Kara smiles, the megawatt sort that Lena’s never managed to get used to. “It’s cos you’re in control of your life, now. All of it. No one can make you do anything, not anymore. Well, except me, of course.”  
  
Lena raises an eyebrow. “Is that so?”  
  
“Yep,” Kara smirks, bites her lip. “Watch, I’ll prove it.” She takes a deep breath, making a show of concentrating, as if she’s about to attempt some particularly difficult magic. Then – “Kiss me.”  
  
Lena laughs, and Kara’s lips quirk up in mirrored amusement. She could hold off to tease her, to prove a point but god, why would she _want_ to, when Kara is happy and she’s happy and the gravity between them is so strong that she doesn’t even think about it.  
  
Lena kisses her, swallows Kara’s tiny gasp and drowns in the feeling of soft lips skating against her own, in the smell of vanilla, in how much she just _loves_ her. Kara probably meant to say _told you so_ at some point, but it’s lost, forgotten. The kiss is gentle until Kara’s fingers slide through the belt loops of Lena’s jeans, and she twists them so the wall is against the blonde’s back, because then all bets are off. Lena kisses her way down Kara’s neck, grins when she squirms; when she lets her teeth graze her girlfriend’s collarbone, the noise she makes is new and definitely Lena’s favourite. Her hands slowly hedge beyond the hem of Kara’s blue top, fingers drifting across abs that Lena will absolutely never get over.  
  
Kara drags their mouths back together, and her brain is short-circuiting but it’s perfect. “Tell me when you want to stop,” she murmurs, probably too low and gravely, and Kara nods so Lena knows she’s heard, but they don’t slow down.  
  
Eventually, Kara breaks the kiss off, and Lena’s about to ask if she’s okay when she realises that the blonde is pulling her shirt over her head, and now _Lena’s_ the one who’s not okay, because _wow_ , but now she also has no idea what to do with herself.  
  
“Lena?”  
  
“Yes-um-yeah-yes.” It’s a glorified cough, but almost enough to pass for words.  
  
“You all right?”  
  
Is there a way to explain that she is simultaneously _very extremely_ all right but will also probably never be completely all right again after this? She doesn’t think so, and instead decides to keep kissing Kara instead of replying, and it’s a good call. Lena bites gently at her girlfriend’s bottom lip, and her hand feels like it’s burning as it traces down the soft material of Kara’s skirt, skittering across the skin of her thigh before pulling Kara’s leg up to wrap around her waist, slowly enough that she has a dozen chances to move away. She presses the blonde harder against the wall, and apparently this angle change is really working, because Kara moans, her head tilting back against the stone work, and Lena kisses along her jaw.  
  
Hands are tugging at the back of her tank top, drawing it up. She’s breathless, and should step away enough for Kara to slide it over her head, but Lena can’t seem to move back for even a second, not when she can feel how fast Kara’s pulse is going as she drags her lips up the column on her throat.  
  
It shouldn’t be as easy to lift Kara as it is when her other leg lifts to lock around Lena’s hips, and she’d ask whether Kara’s accidentally flying a bit, were it not for the fact that she’s completely focused on the new skin her hands are resting against, and the fingers tangling harshly in her hair.  
  
Kara’s always wanted them to go slow, but this isn’t slow at all, not with how the hem of her skirt is riding higher and higher, and the blonde is sort of rocking into her a little bit, just tiny motions with her hips, but enough to make Lena forget that actually breathing is important.  
  
Lena doesn’t want to stop, god, she _never_ wants to, but maybe – “We should probably…” _stand at least ten feet away from each other so I can think clearly enough to ask if this is something you want to do_ , she should say, but that’s an awful lot of words for someone to manage when they’re currently holding the prettiest girl in the world.  
  
“Uh huh,” Kara whispers, even though she can have no idea what Lena’s trying to tell her when she hasn’t actually produced a sentence. The way the blonde sucks at her neck has Lena’s logical brain activity flat-lining, and her nails scrape up pale skin, chasing the hemline that is inching further and further away from where it originally fell at just above Kara’s knees. “ _God._ ”  
  
A door slams, and it’s at least half the house away, but it’s enough to make Lena stiffen, because there’s only one person that could be. Lillian’s been gone so long that she’s been lulled into a false sense of security, but it was naïve to think that she might not have to deal with her all summer. If she finds Lena with a half-naked girl, she will _kill_ her, and no doubt stab Kara with one of those icy glares that have the same hollowing effect as a Dementor’s Kiss.     
  
“What -” Kara begins, but Lena quickly presses a finger to her lips (soft, kiss-bruised and – _not now_ ).  
  
She carefully, regretfully sets her girlfriend back on the floor, and grabs her shirt from where it ended up on the desk a few feet away, pressing it into Kara’s hands.  
  
“My mother’s here,” she breathes. “I heard her shut the door in the foyer. If we’re quiet, we can get out before she knows we were here. You do _not_ want to meet her.”  
  
Kara nods in understanding, pulling the t-shirt back over her head and straightening her skirt. The glimmer of smeared lip gloss across her neck and her tousled hair make it look they’ve been doing exactly what they’ve been doing, but that can be fixed on the beach back at Kara’s house, however ridiculously attractive Lena finds it.  
  
Kara reaches out and tugs Lena’s tank top down so it’s covering the skin it was intended to, and she can’t help but shiver as fingers skirt the edge of her bra to find the hem of the twisted clothing.  
  
Lena takes a tight hold of her hand and quickly Apparates them away to safety. Instead of ending up on the beach like she planned, they materialise ankle-deep in the ocean.  
  
Kara laughs. “I thought you said you were _super accurate._ ”  
  
Lena pokes her gently. “To be fair, you weren’t there being all gorgeous and distracting and everything while I was taking the test,” she defends.

///

Alex insists on taking her out for a Fire Whiskey to celebrate coming of age, so Lena goes over to her apartment the next Saturday night. It’s just the two of them at a wizarding bar apparently frequented by Auror trainees, and she wins them a free round of shots after it turns out she’s surprisingly good at darts (much like chess pieces, it mostly comes down to sternly instructing them to hit the bullseye, and no to fly off at the first glimmer of bright light).

She likes the burn of the alcohol and the somewhat rowdy atmosphere of the pub, but she makes a conscious effort not to drink too much. Not only can she not risk doing something stupid, as the world is really only waiting for a Luthor to slip up, but she’s also seen the disappointed pout Kara levels Alex with when she’s inebriated or hung over, and Lena has no desire to be on the receiving end of that look.  
  
“How’re things with Kara?” Alex asks, and she kicks back in the chair like she owns it, drink steady in a practiced hand.  
  
Lena raises an eyebrow. “You talk to her _every day_. You know exactly how things are.”  
  
The eldest Danvers elbows her. “No, I know how _she_ feels about things. But I’m basically your big sister, too, so if you want to talk about anything with me, you can.”  
  
Lena can’t help the smile that springs to her face, because even though she’s grown and she’s less doubting of people - has learned to believe that the people around her care about her, love her - it’s still weird and awesome to be reminded. “And I appreciate it. But it’s -” Lena tries to search for a word that’s not so sappy that Alex will roll her eyes to infinity and back. “Great. Really great. I’m really happy,” she announces, and her younger self would be in awe of her for being able to say that and mean it.  
  
“Are you sure?” Alex pries.  
  
Lena panics. “Why, did Kara say something to you? Is she not -”  
  
Alex waves her off. “God, no, _relax._ She’s crazy about you. It’s gross. I just meant that you’re doing that stare-uncertainly-into-the-distance thing you used to do all the time when you were sad when you were little.”  
  
“Oh,” Lena sighs. “Yeah. It’s just – I know that no one’s heard from him forever, but…”  
  
“You’re still worried about Lex,” Alex deduces.  
  
“Mm. Will I ever be able to shake that? I’m terrified that he’s just biding his time, and I should be preparing somehow.”  
  
“I don’t know. But I’m at the Ministry all the time now, and so is Dad, so I promise that if I hear _anything_ , I’ll send you an owl straight away. And if you’re at school and something feels off, write to me and we’ll Apparate to Hogsmeade and check it out, okay? Even if it’s small, or you’re not sure, we’ll be there. Deal?”  
  
“Deal,” Lena agrees, and the weight on her shoulders lessens a little, but they both know that it’ll never disappear entirely.

///

Lena crashes at Winn’s for almost two weeks straight on a caffeine-fuelled inventing spree, which mostly involves a lot of staring at switchboards and nearly snapping their wands in frustration.

While at times it’s like a boot is grinding her brain into the pavement, she loves it, because she and Winn alike are addicted to challenges, to taking something that makes no sense and forcing it to function. He has about as much parental supervision as she does, so it’s just the two of them in his basement, napping at odd hours around brain-storming marathons. The end result is three extremely promising prototypes.  
  
“We should sell these at Hogwarts,” Winn mumbles tiredly. “You know, as beta trial. Consumer data. Capitalism. Market cohesion.”  
  
“You’re just saying random phrases now, buddy, go to sleep,” Lena tells him, giving his fluffy hair a quick pat. She’s exhausted, too, and the world is a little fuzzy, but she stays up just a little bit longer to gaze happily at their creations, technical drawings from her sketchbook come to life.  
  
She can’t wait to show Kara.

///

Lena has a ten of diamonds and a warlock face card, and while it’s a decent hand, Maggie’s expression is giving absolutely nothing away about her own. Alex’s conservative approach to betting had her folding even before the river, and Kara’s impressive array of obvious tells also meant she threw her cards in early after they all quickly worked out she had nothing, so now it’s just the two of them, head to head.  
  
“Last chance to fold, Sawyer,” she teases, sliding another galleon across the table to join the pot. The Danvers sisters watch with interest from their exile at the other end of the table, neither allowed closer lest they see the hands in play and give something away.  
  
“Never,” Maggie declares, predictably, because Maggie could have a seven and a two and still not cave.  
  
“If only you were this good at Muggle pool, you wouldn’t have to buy me drinks all the time,” Alex muses, smirking.  
  
“Was that supposed to be a compliment on my poker skills or a jab at my pool playing?” Maggie enquires as she drops a handful of sickles beside Lena’s galleon and the money that the Danvers’ lost. “Call.”  
  
“Both,” Alex clarifies.  
  
“Okay, show me what you got, Lena,” Maggie taunts, and for all Lena’s last-name trash-talking bravado, Maggie will never return it with a _Luthor_ , for which she is eternally grateful.  
  
She smirks. “Three of a kind.” She tosses her warlock card down next to the two in the river, and Maggie grumbles, dropping her pair of sixes. It’s never really mattered who won – the money goes to buying pizza regardless, but it feels like a victory when Kara sticks her tongue out at Alex and then kisses Lena’s cheek.

///

“Where’s Kara today?” James asks, hands darting out to catch the ball she’s enchanted to attempt to fly past him.  
  
Lena flicks her wand and the makeshift Quaffle (it’s really a basketball) wiggles in his grasp before sailing back across the room to her. “Clark’s showing her around the Daily Prophet offices. If her NEWTs grades are high enough, she’ll be able to get an internship over there next year,” Lena tells him proudly, sending the ball back his way at twice the speed in the hopes that this time, she’ll be able to score against him.  
  
No such luck; he leaps up and grabs it before it can touch the appointed ‘score zone’ on the wall that they have designed in lieu of actual goal posts. “That’s awesome! Man, I can’t believe how fast everything’s happening. Kara’s got a way to start in journalism, I’ve got try-outs for league teams next June, and you and Winn are already trialling your hybrid tech. I always thought that I’d be terrified for seventh year to end, but I think we’re all gonna be okay, you know? Like, we’ll just be able to enjoy our last months at Hogwarts, and also enjoy leaving.”  
  
“Yeah,” Lena agrees, because he’s right; they might not be the most mature, well-rounded people in the world, but all of them have grown more in the past six years than they’ll probably ever realise, and when they’re thrown in the deep end, they’ll swim. “I will miss school, though,” she adds, because it was the first place she ever felt safe, it’s where she met Kara, the boys, where she made herself into a person that she can look in the eye when she stands in front of the mirror.  
  
“Of course,” James tells her, making another remarkable block that gives her every confidence in him for next year’s professional league try-outs. “It’ll always be _the good old days_ there; you know? We’ll be in a bar in ten years, and I’ll be famous and you’ll be rich and married to Kara, and we’ll be saying stuff like _remember that time in fifth year…_ ”  
  
“Who says I’ll be married to Kara?” Lena mutters, going red, although her words lack any kind of indignation, because how could she ever protest an idea like that?  
  
James rolls his eyes. “I might’ve flunked out of Divination, Lena, but I think I can predict that part of your future just fine. The biggest fight you guys ever had was because you both liked each other too much to talk about how much you liked each other,” he laughs. “Neither of you could ever walk away, no matter what. And I guess, yeah, there’s the possibility that I’m wrong. I hope I’m not,” – Lena hopes not, too – “but even if you end up dating other people, she’s always going to be the one you love the most. That’s not something you can out-grow or out-run, even if you can try to get over it.”  
  
Lena nods, but even the hypothetical of them breaking up makes her kind of sick, so she says, “Let’s go back to that version where we’re at the bar and you’re famous.”  
  
“Right. Well, Winn and Alex will be trying to out-nerd each other at the Auror department, and I reckon Maggie will join the division which integrates into the Muggle cops to cover up magical crime,” James rounds out his own little prophecy. “And even though Lucy’s dad is still trying to get her to work for the Department of Mysteries, and she isn’t sure what she wants to do yet, she’ll be kicking ass at whatever she chooses.”  
  
Lena thinks that it’s probably ridiculously naïve of them to try and guess where they’ll be, when life has proven itself to be unpredictable over and over, but it’s nice to believe. Because the picture James paints is beautiful and bright and she _wants_ it.

///

It’s the best summer Lena’s ever had, and it’s gone in a blink, time haemorrhaging uncontrollably out of her hands and dissipating back into the rest of the universe. A week before she leaves to return to school she goes to her mother’s study, and for the first time in her whole life, her hand doesn’t shake a little when she raises it to knock.  
  
“Come in,” Lillian’s muted voice echoes out.  
  
Lena slips inside, keeping the door open behind her out of habit as an escape route. “Mother,” she greets stiffly. Lillian arches as eyebrow, her apathy and distaste cutting through the air between them. “I came to say goodbye.”  
  
“We’ve never said farewell before, Lena. Honestly, nine months is hardly much time to go without seeing you,” her mother notes.  
  
Lena sighs. “I don’t mean, _goodbye for the school year_. Once I finish school this year, I’m not coming back. Ever.”  
  
Lillian laughs. “You do realise that you only got about half of your inheritance from Lionel on your seventeenth birthday? The rest is tied up in being a Luthor. I can cut you off from everything you would’ve got.”  
  
Lena thinks about Kara’s smile and Winn’s jokes and James’ hugs and all the things that bloodstained Luthor galleons cannot buy, and says, “You act as if there’s enough money in the world that could make me stay here with you.”  
  
“How vicious, Lena,” her mother sneers. “Maybe there’s more of me in you than I thought.”  
  
The words tumble around her head for hours, and she nearly throws up when she gets back to her room. She’s spent so long digging herself out from under the Luthor legacy, and escaping the darkness that hangs up about them that it’s been years before she’s been truly afraid that some of it might’ve seeped under her skin.  
  
She doesn’t answer the owl Kara sends her the next day, or any in the two days after.

///

Lena is staring at the ceiling when her bedroom window creaks open and a figure thuds onto the carpet.  
  
She starts, reaches for a wand, completely sure for a moment that it’s Lex, come to finish what he started more than a year ago (even longer than that, really).  
  
“Whoa, babe, relax. It’s me.” Kara tells her, and Lena feels the air rush out of her lungs instantly with relief.  
  
She drags herself out of bed, lack of sleep making her sluggish as she walks over to Kara. “God, Kara, it’s pouring outside, you’re soaked. You shouldn’t fly in the rain.”  
  
“Well, it’s not like I could Apparate to see you. Look, if something’s going on, you know I’ll give you whatever time and space you need, but can you just tell me that you’re okay? Last time you went all radio silent, at least I knew why. I just wanted to check that nothing had happened to you.”  
  
Lena hugs her girlfriend close, and some of the tension leaves her shoulders with how Kara’s arms don’t even hesitate a second before wrapping around her tightly.  
  
“Nothing’s happened. I’m sorry. It’s just – my mother.” She doesn’t need to explain that Lillian has a way of dragging back every fear that eleven-year-old Lena had into the present, because Kara _knows_. And maybe in years past she would’ve stopped at that, huddled into her own consciousness, but not anymore. “She says I’m like her, and god, it’s just like being punched through the ribs, you know?”  
  
“You are like her,” Kara says, and Lena fights the instinct to recoil, because she trusts Kara, and whatever she tells her, Lena needs to hear. “You’re smart and ambitious and calm and very elegant. But you’re also not like her as well. In all the ways that count, you’re your own person, and that person is amazing. And you _know_ that, Lena. You’ve just got to work on remembering it, even when someone tries to tell you that it isn’t true. That said, I’ll deck her if you want.”  
  
Lena lets out a soft laugh at the idea of Kara being even remotely aggressive towards anyone. “Sometimes I feel like I take one step forward and two back, with her and I. I’m just getting away and she still manages to read out and pull me back.”  
  
“Well, even if it’s two steps back, I’ll take them with you.” Kara takes one of Lena’s hands, and rests the other on her waist. They’re dripping with cool water, but still warm somehow. She pulls Lena forward, one foot in front of the other, and then presses them two paces backward. Lena’s always used this motion to describe struggle, trying your best and losing anyway, but with Kara, it’s dancing. She risks a smile, and twirls the blonde around, listening to her giggle.  
  
“You’re my favourite person in the whole world,” Lena tells her, and she doesn’t just mean of the people that she’s met so far. She means _ever_. There are seven billion out there, living and breathing, and Lena still knows that none of them could hold a candle to Kara, to the way Kara makes her feel, will always make her feel.

///

“You owe me a sickle,” Lena crows gleefully to James when Kara falls asleep on the train before Winn does.  
  
James groans, reaching into his pocket. “We were up _so late_ playing his Muggle video games last night. I thought it was a sure thing.” He casts a disappointed look at Winn, who shrugs apologetically.  
  
“Not my fault you took a sucker’s bet,” Winn tells him. “The rain always knocks Kara out, not to mention that Lena is insanely easy to sleep on. She’s so comfy.”  
  
“ _What?_ ” James yelps out, and it’s loud enough to wake Kara.  
  
“I still win even though she woke up,” Lena mutters, even as she brushes a few strands of hair out of her girlfriend’s eyes.  
  
“What are we talking about?” Kara mumbles sleepily, looking a little disoriented as she glances around the carriage.  
  
“Apparently, how easy Lena is to sleep on?” James raises his eyebrow pointedly.  
  
“We were up late designing stuff,” Winn defends. “Caffeine isn’t completely fool proof, and I passed out for a little bit. It’s not like it’s weird.”  
  
“She _is_ comfy,” Kara agrees, resting her head back against Lena’s shoulder.  
  
“Thanks, babe.”  
  
“So I get ridiculed and she gets _thanks, babe_?” Winn complains.  
  
“Do you want me to tell you _thanks, babe_ as well?” Lena offers drily.  
  
The Ravenclaw huffs. “No, I think I’m good.”  
  
Lena can feel Kara’s grin against her collarbone, before her breathing evens out again, and James relinquishes the sickle to her custody, grudgingly upholding the honour code of a bet won.

///

The first years seem smaller than ever as they line up to get Sorted. They’re all so tiny and nervous; she can’t help but wonder what they’ll look like when they’re in her shoes, standing back as seventh years and smiling nostalgically around them, thinking about their past selves.

As opposed to the stiffly ironed uniforms and neatly combed hair of the younger students, the seniors are only just short of a collective mess.

Lena’s tie isn’t even done up, and neither are the first new buttons of her blouse; there’s a tear in the bottom of her robes, and her shoes are scuffed from all the time spent walking over cobbles in London with Kara and the others over break. She’s usually a fairly neat person, but dressing casually helps it feel like the stiffness of the Luthor house is leaking away.  
  
James has forgotten his tie completely, and hasn’t bothered to wear robes at all, but it’s not like he needs anything to distinguish what house he’s in, not when he’s Gryffindor’s star player.  
  
Winn and Kara are both reasonably put together, although everything is undeniably well-worn and comfy. The only thing that’s not even remotely up to code is the light-up sneakers that they’re both wearing, a prototype of Lena and Winn’s. Apparently, such footwear never reached the wizarding community, and is a fantastic novelty, even to older wizards. They’re admittedly far less tacky than the Muggle sort, and are instead enchanted to display glowing cosmic images like supernovas and galaxies. While Winn’s wearing his for promotional purposes, Kara’s just kept them on because she loves them.  
  
The teachers don’t try to scold them for their scruffiness; instead asking them about their summers while occasionally shouting at passing second years to straighten their ties, commands for which they receive tiny pouts.  
  
It’s the one time of year that they all sit at their house tables, and they all file out, finding their places among their peers. She is struck with the realisation that were it not for a few odd twists of fate, it would’ve been very easy for them to move in their house-centric circles, for none of them to ever have become friends at all. And maybe fate has backstabbed Lena a few times, but she supposes this more than makes up for it.  
  
She sits at the Slytherin table between Jess and Donovan, and looks to the front.  
  
There’s the irrepressible sense among the seniors that this is the beginning of the end.

///

“God, it’s like the goddamn OWLs all over again,” James groans, throwing himself dramatically onto the couch in the Hufflepuff common room. Nobody asks why a Gryffindor has burst in; everyone here has had their entire schooling careers to get used to it.  
  
“How much homework did you get?” Lena asks sympathetically, looking up from her Transfiguration textbook, resting the spine against Kara’s legs where they lay in her lap.  
  
“Enough that I want to _die_ ,” he complains. “I don’t need good grades to be a Quidditch player. Hell, you don’t need NEWTs to do your inventing stuff, why on earth are you still here?”  
  
“Are you suggesting I leave school?”  
  
“Wait, what?” Kara demands, having just tuned into their conversation.  
  
“No – nothing. James and I were just talking about how NEWTs are kind of unnecessary for us.”  
  
“Don’t remind me,” Kara complains, letting the stack of notes in her hands drop heavily onto her stomach as she presses her palms into her eyes. “I can’t believe we have this much work and it’s only the first week. How did Alex ever survive this?”  
  
“Want to call her and ask?” Lena offers, smiling.  
  
Kara’s brow furrows. “What do you mean?”  
  
She grins. “Well, I know how much you missed her last year, so Winn and I left one of our prototype wizarding Floo powder phones with her. I’ve got the other one. You’ll only be able to hear her voice, but it’s better than a letter, right? You can talk to her anytime you want. We were going to surprise you later, but…”  
  
Kara squeals. “Oh my god, you’re the best! Thank you!”  
  
“Don’t suppose we can use it during exams to ask her what the answers are?” James jokes, and Lena flicks him in the side of head with her finger.

///

“I want us to go to the Astronomy Tower,” she says, and Kara flinches, even as her grip on Lena’s hand tightens.  
  
“I haven’t gone back since -”  
  
“I know. You dropped the class after I fell. But, Kara, you love the stars so much, and this is our last year, and… I can’t leave here with a corner of the castle always being Lex’s in the back of my mind. And I don’t think it should be that way for you, either,” she tells her, her free hand coming to rest on Kara’s shoulder. “Come look at the sky with me?”  
  
Late that night, they sneak out of their dorms and meet at the foot of the Tower stairs. Lena holds Kara’s hand the whole way up, and then steers far clear of the window, because she can see the way Kara’s expression tightens the closer to the edge she gets. They lie on the floor side by side, gazing up at the cosmos, and it’s been so long since either of them took Astronomy that they aren’t sure of the constellations anymore, but Kara’s always preferred to make them up, anyway.  
  
“I think that one looks like a puppy, you know?” Kara traces the dog outline with her finger, but Lena can’t see it. They’re just random stars to her – beautiful, but still only stars. No pictures. Kara has a special magic in her that has nothing to do with being a witch, that allows her to stare at ordinary things and see something amazing in them. The clouds, the stars, Lena herself.

///

In potions class, they take a shot at brewing Felix Felicis. Winn and James’ attempt spills and leaves a mess of dripping, viscous yellow liquid. Lena and Donovan, though, manage to get a silky, golden concoction that their teacher proclaims to be the most successful student attempt in five years.  
  
“It’s unlikely to do much, most fully qualified wizards can’t produce proper Felix Felicis, but don’t waste this opportunity to try a little,” the Professor suggests, and since Lena doesn’t feel like she needs any more luck than she has, she gestures for Don to do the honours.  
  
Nothing happens for a few minutes, and the rest of the class eventually loses interest, deciding that perhaps their brew isn’t as potent as intended, and is unlikely to yield interesting results.  
  
Then – “Lena, I think it’s working,” Don whispers. “It’s like I could do anything and no one could to stop me.”  
  
Lena glances down at the textbook, a little unsettled by his description. “It’s supposed to feel as if you’re being guided to the right decisions.”  
Donovan shakes his head. “No. There’s no right decisions. Just no bad decisions.”  
  
“Professor? I don’t think it’s working properly,” Lena calls out. “Don, just, don’t do anything, okay? We might’ve screwed up.” A glimmer of red dances through the liquid in the cauldron. “Okay, that’s bad. Professor?” But the teacher is occupied with an explosion caused by a handful of Hufflepuffs up the front of the classroom, which has set at least three things (including a student) on fire.  
  
“No, don’t worry about it, Lena. I’m great. I feel great. Nothing could go wrong.” He reaches out and snaps her quill in half. “See? No consequences.”  
  
“This seems less like luck and more like a lack of impulse control,” Lena tells him concernedly.  
  
“That sounds smart. You’re so smart, Lena,” Don mutters, staring at her a little too intensely for her taste.  
  
“Thanks, Don,” she mumbles, flicking through her textbook to find out what’s going on. A passage at the bottom reads: _When brewed improperly, Felix Felicis typically become inert. However, on occasion, it can create the illusion of luck with none of the fortune itself, leading to irrational decision making, an inflated sense of confidence and ego, and a reduction of inhibitions._  
  
“You’re not just smart, you’re pretty, too,” he adds.  
  
“Sure,” she agrees without listening, eyes fixed on the text, trying to discern where the potion went wrong, and if she can correct their error.  
  
“I still like you, you know, even though you turned me down in fifth year. I’ve never really had a chance to get over it. We hang out all the time.”  
  
Lena straightens at that. “Oh, Don. I didn’t know that. You never told me.” She feels awful; remembers how hard it had been sometimes to be around Kara when she was sure it was all unrequited. Don’s interest isn’t quite the same (not as deep, not as permeating), but it must still hurt a little. “Should we… Maybe stay away from each other for a while, if that’ll help you, um, move on?” He’s her team captain, and he and Jess are probably her closest friends, not counting Kara and the boys (technically, they’re only friends, too, but somewhere along the way, her brain started unconsciously correcting that to family), so it’ll suck, but he deserves space.  
  
“I don’t want to move on,” he says sharply, and the tone is unusually harsh for her typically laid-back friend, and it makes her start. She casts an uncomfortable glance over his shoulder, and thankfully, Winn catches her eye, and nudges James. Maybe the boys will be able to calm him down, because she only seems to be working him up.  
  
“Listen, Don -” she begins, but never gets to finish, because he kisses her. Kara had done that once – kissed her in the middle of a sentence – but as a way to let her know it was okay to stop rambling, to communicate without words that she didn’t need to be nervous. When Don does it, though, it feels like the words are being stolen from her, and his mouth is suffocating, because she _doesn’t want it_ , and he tastes wrong, and she’s pushing him away but he’s no moving. And even though it’s not fair to blame him for what the potion’s doing, but when he bites her lip hard, the blood taste like betrayal. She brings her knee up sharply, and finally, he’s doubling over, pulling away enough for her to breathe -  
  
Then James is dragging Don off her, shaking him, asking him what the hell he thinks he’s doing. The Professor finally turns around from the fiery Hufflepuff drama to see what’s going on, and tells them that she’s going to get a calming draught for Donovan.

Winn heals Lena’s lip, but everything is still flavoured like copper and _Don_ and she is horribly reminded of how powerless she is without her wand.  
  
She doesn’t realise that she’s crying until Winn’s brushing her tears away, and she looks up to see that he’s taken her out into the corridor.  
  
“We’re gonna go back to your dorm, okay?” he murmurs, taking her hand and gently pulling her along. He’s her big brother and little brother all wrapped into one, and she feels safe around him. She wonders if she’ll feel that around Donovan ever again, even armed with the knowledge that he wasn’t himself. With time, she imagines.

///  
  
Winn mutters the password and tugs her into the Slytherin common room; security is amazingly lax among seniors, and she doesn’t think there’s a single person in their graduating class who doesn’t know how to get into at least three of the four houses’ quarters.

The stairs to the girls’ dorm should turn into a slide under Winn’s feet, but perhaps the castle understands that she needs him, because it barely does more than tilt.  
  
They sit side by side on her bed, and he asks before wrapping his arm around her.  
  
“I shouldn’t be this upset over a kiss, should I?” she mumbles into his shirt.  
  
“I think that when someone does something to you that you don’t want them to, it’s horrible, and being upset is okay, it’s more than okay,” Winn tells her, carefully rubbing her shoulder.  
  
“It’s not so much that he kissed me when I didn’t want him to. It’s that I tried to make him stop and he didn’t,” Lena mumbles. Her lips feel bruised from how hard he’d pushed into them, moving out of sync with hers.  
  
“I’m sorry, Lena,” he comforts, clearly a little out of his depth, unsure what to say to make her feel better. Out of their group, it’s always Kara who -  
  
“ _Kara_. Oh, god, what if she’s mad?”  
  
“She’s going to be _really_ mad,” he agrees, and she presses her palms into her eyes, trying to eradicate the tears welling back up. “Whoa, Lena – Lena, no, I meant at _Don._ Not you. She’s not going to be mad at you at _all._ You didn’t do anything wrong.”  
  
“I know,” she mumbles, even though if it still seems a little like she did, because she’d never planned on kissing anyone other than Kara, for the rest of _ever._

///

After class, James shows up with Kara, and then the two boys leave them alone. Kara doesn’t kiss her in greeting, which is odd. They talk for a while, Kara in Lena’s lap and Lena’s forehead resting against her neck, face pressed into the comfort of vanilla-scented robes. Kara strokes her hair and hums to her and says _god, Lena, I’m so sorry,_ and _I could never be mad, ever._ But she still doesn’t kiss her, not even on the cheek, and it seems significant, because Lena can see her _almost_ lean in, and then stop herself.  
  
“You _are_ cross, aren’t you?” Lena sighs.  
  
Kara starts. “No, no, no. What? Why would you think that?”  
  
“You won’t kiss me.”  
  
“I wasn’t sure if you’d want to be kissed, babe,” Kara says softly. “I thought you might need time.”  
  
“Time away from Don, probably. But do I want to be kissed? By you, always,” Lena tells her. Maybe it’ll finally get rid of the lingering invasion on her tongue, but even if it doesn’t, having Kara this close makes her feel better, no matter what.  
  
Kara still waits for her to close the gap herself, though, which Lena does without hesitation, because it’s so different from Don that it barely seems like the same action. Kara is delicate and tentative and Lena is warm and calm and loved.

///

Donovan sends her an owl telling her how sorry he is, and although they both know it was the potion, he doesn’t try to push all the blame onto the botched Felix Felicis. He writes that he’s going to keep away from her, and when she’s ready to talk to him again, he’ll be waiting.

///

Quidditch practice is awkward for a few weeks, but the cloud of her nervousness and his guilt gradually begins to lessen from a smog to a smoke, and she thinks that given a while, it will dissipate almost completely.

///

While Lena’s pacing the seventh floor corridor, desperately trying to think of a quiet place she can work in secret on Kara’s birthday present, she finds a door that leads to a spacious workshop.

She could’ve sworn she’s never even heard of this place before, but the castle, she’s long since learned, is much like a quiet person – made of complicated facets and hidden depths that will be revealed if you are gentle and patient. There’s two large benches and a whole array of tools and miscellaneous parts, and it couldn’t be a more perfect place if she’d designed it herself. In the corner is a bed that she crashes on when she works late into the night.

///

On Kara’s seventeenth birthday, Lena takes her to the magic workshop room, and presents her with the small, hemispherical device that she’s been carefully designing and building for weeks. When she turns it on, it projects the night sky onto the ceiling.  
  
“I can charm it so it’ll show the stars of anywhere in the world,” she tells Kara. “I thought you could put it in your room.”  
  
“Could – could you make it do home? Not, like, my house, but, um, Krypton.”  
  
Lena adjusts the small latitude and longitude knobs at the base, and the glow flickers, then casts cosmic arrays that are not totally familiar.  
  
“That’s exactly what it looked like,” Kara breathes, flopping back onto the bed near them to stare upwards at the twinkling lights.  
  
Lena realises that she’s crying. “Oh, no, Kara, I didn’t mean to make you sad -”  
  
“I’m not sad,” Kara promises. “Well, I am, but, like, nostalgic-sad. Not tragic-sad.” She pats the mattress next to her, and after a moment, Lena lies down beside her.  
  
“My mum used to teach me the stars.” It’s whispered like a secret. Kara turns her head, gaze dancing from the stars to look at Lena. “She would’ve loved you, you know. You’re so smart and tough and do everything you can to make things right. You’re brave, like her. Did you know that she was a Slytherin?”  
  
“You never told me that,” Lena notes. Her fingers tangle with Kara’s.  
  
“Uh huh. Head Girl and everything.” It’s one of those rare and precious times when Kara’s heart seems to relax enough to leak a few of her tightly guarded memories of her wizarding colony, and she tells Lena wistful stories of where she used to live and who she used to know.  
  
“Thank you for giving this to me,” Kara murmurs, when her voice is full of sleep, and she’s almost too tired to keep her eyes open and on the projected stars.  
  
“It took me ages to come up with an idea for you,” Lena reveals. “But you love stars and adventures, and I love you, so it seemed like a good plan.”  
  
Kara kisses her cheek. “Love you, too.”

///

Lena can’t open her eyes. Can’t move her head, legs, arms, even just her fingers. Everything is numb and dampened and distant, and uncontrollable panic begins to well up within her, because she can’t be trapped like this again. What if she can’t escape this time? What if she’s locked inside herself forever?  
  
“ _Lena! Wake up!”_ She wishes she could, wishes this was just a dream, but the coma has slithered up and grabbed a hold of her again. She’d cry if she could, because claustrophobia is already choking her. “ _Lena!_ ”  
  
Suddenly, she’s shaken awake, and thrashes violently for a moment, before reality and fiction distil in her head into two separate entities. Kara’s on the bed beside her, where she was last night when they fell asleep together under the fake stars. She’s half upright, watching Lena worriedly, a gentle hand carding through her hair. The clock on the wall says one a.m., and the room is lit only by the small lamp near them that Kara must’ve just turned on.  
  
“Want to do the check, like we used to?” Kara asks, not having to ask what the nightmare was about, because it’s _always_ about the cruciatus coma these days. Lena nods hurriedly.  
  
“Okay. Toes?” Lena wriggles them under the sheet, feels them work, move at her command, registers the smooth brush of fabric.

“Ankles?” She rolls them, ensures they’re responsive, properly controlled. Together, they do an inventory of the nerves and muscles in her body, all the way up until the rapid beating of her heart has slowed, and the version of herself that is free seems more real than the one who was trapped.

“Neck?” Lena’s sitting up now, and tilts her head from side to side.  
  
“Mouth?” She leans across and kisses Kara, her hand coming up to rest on her girlfriend’s jaw, and doesn’t pull away until Kara’s breathless. “Mouth seems fine,” Kara stumbles out, looking a little dazed.  
  
“Only fine?”  
  
“Well, _no,_ I meant -”  
  
“I can do better than fine,” Lena teases, and closes the gap between them again, tugs Kara nearer until the blonde is straddling her lap, and Lena’s free to skate her hands delicately up and down the sides of her thighs, the warmth of the skin under her fingers dizzying. Kara does that soft, gasping moan that makes Lena want to push her up against a wall. The mattress is just as good, though, so she flips them carefully, not wanting to jostle them too much. Kara’s knees drag up to frame Lena’s hips as she kisses down the other girl’s neck, leaning her weight on her elbows and knees.

When Kara bites her lip, she can’t help but jerk forward, seeking more contact, her thigh rocking down. The sudden friction is a game changer, and then Kara’s long-sleeved shirt is being tugged off, Lena’s fingers are trailing over the defined muscles of her stomach, dancing across her hipbone, a nail tracing just this side of the waistband of her pyjama pants. Kara’s fumbling with the buttons on Lena’s shirt, and she hasn’t formed a single logical thought in almost ten minutes –

A horrible, burning pain flares through her forearm, so excruciating that she isn’t sure if she’s going to pass out or throw up. She rolls to the left so she won’t collapse on top of Kara and crush her, and ends up tumbling to the floor. Lena hits her elbow and the back of her head horribly hard, but that fades to the background in favour of the high-definition pain that is caused, Lena can make out through involuntary tears, by words carving themselves into her skin.  
  
_I hear you’re happy_ appears first, the pale canvas of her arm running red with blood for ink. It’s Lex’s handwriting, and she has no idea what he’s doing, how he’s doing it, but all she can think it how she should’ve know something like this would happen, and she should’ve been ready.  
  
“Lena, are you okay?” Kara slides down next to her, and even the sight of her in nothing but a black bra and low-riding plaid pants isn’t enough to distract from the stabbing agony that washes over her as the old words disappear, only have new ones carved in large letters in their place: _You know I can reach anyone._  
  
Kara reaches out for her, but she can’t help but flinch away, folding her arm protectively into her chest, unable to operate on anything but instinct through the haze.  
  
Lena’s screaming now, crying, and she has no idea how, but Lex has managed to make this hurt more than a Cruciatus curse. She wishes she could lose consciousness. Kara’s whispering _babe_ and crying to coax her into showing her arm, because all her girlfriend must be able to see is the blood quickly staining through her clothes.  
  
_So be careful, Lena.  
  
_ Lena knows that Kara’s managed to catch sight of these words because she gasps, but the message is already vanishing, her skin barely healing over before being slashed open again with a threat that hurts more than all the physical pain. She leaps up, ignoring the dizziness, and staggers as far from Kara as she can without hitting the wall.  
  
There are tears streaking down Kara’s face now, too, and Lena desperately wants to hold her close, but now, there can never be enough distance between them.  
  
“You’ve got to stay away from me, Kara,” Lena begs. “Please.” She stumbles back into the door and jerks shakily at the knob until it clunks open and she’s out in the cold corridor, sinking to the stone floor.  
  
Lex’s last warning is yet to fade away, and clearly etched bone-deep into her forearm are the words: _I might decide I want to learn to fly._ He hasn’t said her name, but Lena knows he’s found her Achilles heel, and his knife poised to bring her entire universe to its knees. The only thing she can think to do is make him believe that Kara isn’t where she’s weak, after all, and keep so distant that Lex loses interest in his new prey. 

She drops her head into her hands. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @teamsupercorp on tumblr. come chat :D


	8. the seventh year (part ii)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so for those of you who aren't on tumblr, i talked with the readers who are, and we decided to split the ending again, so you guys could have some now, cos the alternative was waiting like a week. 
> 
> this chapter is a nod to lena in 2.08. hope it's okay! it's the most plot-heavy chapter we've ever had. shit is starting to go down @y'all

The bleeding words and the pain fade over the next few days. The memory of them doesn’t. Lex’s threats burn on her irises every time she passes Kara in the corridor, or catches sight of her in class.  
  
They haven’t talked yet, about what happened. But they will. Because whether they’ve had a choice about it or not, plenty of people have abandoned Kara before, and Lena will not, will _never_ , become someone who leaves. Lena loves her too much to do anything but stay away from her, but also too much not to tell her why.  
  
It’s hard to find a moment, a place, though, because if Lex could see into the hidden workshop, there’s almost no way to know the real limits of his eyes and ears. Except – except, when she was little, and he’d come home from school on break, he’d whisper to her all the castle’s secrets that he’d found. _For when it’s your turn_ , he’d said. There had been mentions of quiet alcoves, disappearing corridors, and even something called the Room of Requirement (which, she is beginning to suspect, is where she took Kara). He never spoke about the secret passageways that run in and out of Hogwarts like tunnels in a hive, though, and she crosses her fingers that in all his years here, he never came across them. He wouldn’t have had a need to – with all that Luthor privilege, the money, the authority, he could walk in and out the front gates whenever he pleased; arrogance was always an ugly colour on him, but now, she’s thankful for it.  
  
A part of her also wonders if the castle kept parts of itself concealed from him on purpose, sensing that subtle darkness about him, and guarding the last of its mysteries.  
  
It gives her one last hope, an untouched space, where she might be able to see her girlfriend without throwing her in the line of fire.  
  
She knows that Lex will be watching far too closely right now for her to try anything, so they wait. The eye contact she has with Kara across crowded rooms is brief and rationed, but she uses it to say, _I’m sorry_ and _I love you_ and _trust me_.  
  
She keeps her distance from Winn and James, too, lest Lex set his sights on them. The loneliness, the avoidance, it all reminds her of those awkward few weeks in fifth year, except it had been relationships at stake back then, not _lives._  
  
It aches, in every sense of the word. It somehow hurts more, knowing Kara is there and that she wants her, than it did when Lena had thought there was nothing between them. She’s more within reach and still even further away.  
  
Her skin still tingles with visceral, tangible memories of _that_ night, before they were interrupted, and that makes her angry at Lex for a whole lot of other reasons. Her mind has a very frustrating habit of imagining possibilities that keep her awake and staring at the ceiling well after curfew, trying to drown out loud what-ifs that make her heart race and her brain fog over.

///

A week goes by, then two. Lena can see the way Kara itches to walk over to her whenever they enter each other’s line of sight; she’ll take a half step in Lena’s direction, before she jerks to a halt. Lena knows what she’s remembering – the few words Kara saw, her own voice begging for the blonde to stay away from her.  
  
Her girlfriend might not understand what’s happening – hell, neither does Lena, really – but she knows enough to keep her distance.  
  
They haven’t been apart this much in years, and it _burns_.

///

She calls Alex on the Floo powder phone; with only two in existence, she knows Lex can’t listen in, like he could intercept her letters. She hides in a broom cupboard in the bottommost parts of the dungeon, retelling it all in whispers so urgent that the words bump into each other, jostling for space in her mouth. Lena doesn’t mention exactly what she was doing (or rather, who) right before Lex’s words arrived, and Alex doesn’t ask.  
  
“I can get an Auror taskforce together, we can be there in -”  
  
“No!” Lena hisses. “Didn’t you hear me? He’s going to come after _Kara_. I’ve bet it all on the Ministry before, Alex, remember, and all that got me was into a coma. I’m _not_ letting the same happen to her. Besides, do you really think Lex wouldn’t find out in about six seconds if you decided to bring a hoard of Aurors to Hogwarts? That’s his green light to go for Kara.”  
  
She hears Alex sigh on the other end of the line. “You’re right. But what the hell are we supposed to do? I can’t leave you there alone to face him, and there’s no way on earth I’m leaving Kara unprotected.”  
  
“He only wants her because of me,” Lena mumbles. “I _am_ protecting her. By staying away.”  
  
Alex pauses. “Does she know that? Does she know what’s going on?”  
  
“Not all of it, not yet. I’m waiting,” Lena explains. “I had to hold out for two weeks before I could even call _you_. I’d rather she was upset with me than dead, Alex.”  
  
She can almost hear the eldest Danvers nodding. “Okay. And you’re right. Lex has probably got informants riddled throughout the Ministry, and Hogwarts. So I won’t make a move. But the _second_ he contacts you again, the stalemate it over, and we won’t hold off any longer. You’ve always said this has got to end somehow, Lena, sometime. You can’t keep this up forever.”  
  
“I know,” Lena says, because this year has been about leaving – Hogwarts, her mother, her old self – but here is an _ending_ , and she tries to ignore the taste of finality, heavy on her tongue.

///

She has a lot of time to herself these days, and only so much of it can be filled with mindless studying. She’s learned her textbooks back to front, and eventually, the words just hang limply in the front of her mind, memorised to the point where they cannot help as a distraction anymore.  
  
After a while, once she’s run down all the one-way streets and seen that there’s no way out of this, never will be unless something breaks, Lena opens that compartment in her mind that she’s long since learned to close. In it, neatly filed and locked up tight, are the thoughts she keeps of her family. Not her Hogwarts one, her real one, but the Luthors. Lex, Lillian, even Lionel, though his face is becoming a little vaguer, warped by the teeth of time. She takes out each memory of them and examines it in the sunlight: how she was never good enough, couldn’t ever be; their hatred of Muggles rubbing against the fact that their daughter was born to some; their conviction, their Luthor righteousness, their belief that she would come to her senses one day.  
  
At the base of her skull is a hatchling idea, a terrible plan, hiding under mental scab she is afraid to lift. It is something that they all, perhaps, would not quite recover from. That she might not even survive.  
  
But when the alternative is keeping away from Kara, hurting Kara, losing Kara, there is no question at all.

///

After three weeks, she’s willing to bet Lex’s eyes will have wandered; nothing interesting is happening at Hogwarts, there is no reason for his attention to remain fixed on her, unwavering. She’s done her best to be as uninteresting as possible, and it’s beginning to pay off.  
  
In the Slytherin dorms that morning, she hides a note in the pocket of Jess’s robes as she hands them to the other girl. Jess puts it in the textbook she loans to Winn in first period. Winn passes it off to James, from palm to palm in one of their dramatic bro handshakes. James slips it into a Keeper’s glove that he gets Kara to wear, ostensibly to help him practice.  
  
It doesn’t say much. Just: _remember nightmares, third year, the statue? 11 o’clock._ But it’ll be enough for Kara, and not anyone else.

///

After her last class, she calls Alex again. Outlines her plan, which feels rough, but inevitable. It was probably always going to end this way.  
  
Alex yells at her for about five minutes about how much of an idiot she is, how she’s going to get herself killed. About what the hell is she supposed to do with Kara if Lena’s gone, about what would Alex be able to do with herself, knowing she let it happen.  
  
But Alex understands things like odds and stakes and finishing what you started, and when Lena waits her out, she caves.  
  
Her last effort is: “Lena, this doesn’t have to be your battle.”  
  
“It is mine. You all tried, remember? You locked him up, you lured him out, but it always comes down to Lex and me.”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“I’ll be there,” Alex says, because she will forever have Lena’s back. Always, the protector. Lena will never stop being grateful to the universe for giving Kara someone like that.  
  
“Okay.”

///

At ten thirty, Lena taps the One Eyed Witch and mumbles “Dissendium”, dropping neatly down into the secret passageway that leads to Honeydukes. Even though she’s almost completely certain that Lex never found any of these tunnels, she still wants to check the area before Kara arrives, just to be safe.

It doesn’t occur to her for a second that Kara won’t come, because of course she will – that’s them. It wouldn’t matter if Lena was angry, or Kara was upset, or if they hadn’t seen each other in years; if one of them wanted the other, they’d be there in a heartbeat. Because it’s not fate or gravity that keeps them together, nothing so easily severed as that. It’s trying hard, every day; it’s loving someone like you’ve never learned not to.  
  
She lights the torch brackets in the wall, illuminating the corridor, checking each inch of darkness, and casting every protective charm she can think of that might not have carried over from the spells already upon the castle.  
  
Once she’s certain that they’ll be alone, she leans against the wall, and waits. Her pulse is out of control, pounding irrationally, leaping at the idea of seeing Kara again, of touching her. She stuffs her hands in her pockets, curls them into fists, because otherwise, she’s going to grab Kara the second she comes down here and kiss her until neither of them can breathe, and they really need to talk first.  
  
At five to eleven, the statue above her slides open, and a robed figure lowers themselves into the passageway, landing gracefully beside Lena. Then the air smells like vanilla and everything is bright blue eyes and tangled blonde hair, and _screw_ hands in pockets because it’s been so long since she held Kara that she literally can’t wait another second. 

Lena reaches over and wraps her arms around Kara’s waist, pulling her into a hug that could probably crack ribs, whispering in her ear how much she’s missed her and how much she loves her, will always love her.  
  
“I know I’m early but I couldn’t wait any more,” Kara mumbles into her neck, fingers digging into Lena’s shoulders. “God, Lena, I’ve been so worried about you. Has your arm healed? Are you okay? What’s going on, really?”  
  
Lena isn’t willing to entirely let go, but she negotiates herself into pulling back slightly, just enough that she can see Kara’s face while still keeping them pressed together. She stares at her for a moment, her stomach flipping, before she answers.  
  
“Lex sent me a warning. Well, he carved it into my skin, but you saw some of that. It was about you.” Lena launches off into a ramble, explaining Lex’s penchant for finding exactly which broken beam will collapse the whole building, and how his idea for targeting Kara is the evolution of the cruciatus coma – his desire to find a way to kill Lena without actually _killing_ her.  
  
Kara tucks a lock of raven hair behind Lena’s ear and listens quietly, her thumb softly skating along Lena’s jaw, as if tracing her sentences before they enter the air. Lena nearly loses track of what she’s saying at the look in her girlfriend’s eyes, but she pushes on.  
  
“- and so that’s why I told you to keep away from me. Because if he thought I didn’t care about you, he might not want you anymore.”  
  
And then Kara voices exactly what had occurred to Lena a few days ago, which forced the plan to slither into existence. “Lena, babe, we’ve been best friends for seven years, and together for two. He _knows_ you, even though we wish he didn’t. He won’t think that you’ve just decided that you don’t love me,” Kara murmurs, mouth twisting sadly at the idea of it.  
  
Lena wants to freeze time here, to never say what she has to say next, to live indefinitely in a loop of the two of them alone, to lock the world out and just pretend. But she can’t, because Lex is a hurricane, destroying everything in his path, and they might’ve found themselves in the eye for now, but they won’t be for long. And she cannot act based on the lives of the two of them when there are hundreds of other people at stake, if not thousands.  
  
Lex is her family. She was there when he slipped into madness, and she’ll be there to try one last time to pull him out of it. It has been years, and she is not a scared little eleven-year-old anymore. There is no one asking her to, no prophecy declaring it must be so; Lena has every out in the book, and she will not take any of them.  
  
“That’s why we have to break up, Kara,” she tells her softly, feels her girlfriend flinch in her arms. “Not for real,” she hurriedly adds. “Never for real. But loudly. Publicly. Everyone has to know. It’ll get back to Lex. And then -”  
  
“You have a plan, don’t you?” Kara whispers. She looks completely unsurprised an entirely heartbroken, because maybe Lex has a habit for firing bullets but Lena has just as much of a habit of stepping into their path. “You’re going to do something stupid to stop him. To save us all.”  
  
“Yeah,” Lena smiles weakly.  
  
Kara nods for a few seconds, wavering on the edge of tears. Lena can see them swimming about in her eyes, refracting the blue and making them shimmer impossibly. Her girlfriend’s hands fist in her Slytherin robes, as if she fully intends to never let go.  
  
After a while, they sink to the floor, Kara in Lena’s lap, her arms draped loosely about her neck, blonde head resting against Lena’s collarbone. She can feel the whisper of Kara’s breath across her skin, hear the hum of her heart.  
  
“Explain it to me,” Kara begs, dissolving the silence. “All of it.”  
  
“Will you promise to stay out of the way? To not step in and try and save me?” Lena’s fingers trace soothing patterns across Kara’s back, as if she is drawing nautical maps for uncharted waters.  
  
There’s a beat. “I don’t think I can promise that.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
“There’s nothing I can do to make you tell me, is there?”

Lena thinks she understands that Lena loves Kara more than she loves being loved _by_ Kara, and because of that, she can’t back down. “I have to do a part of this on my own, Kara, or it won’t work. I wish you could help me, I do. We’ve always helped each other. And I trust you more than anyone. You’re the best witch I know, and the best person. But it has to be me. It has to be a Luthor.”  
  
Kara eyes her. “I wonder what it would be like if you never had that name.”  
  
Lena thinks of all the math, all the variables, all the things she might not have done and most importantly, the people she might not have met. And it doesn’t total out as worth the risk, not anywhere close. “I don’t wonder. Anymore.”  
  
Kara sighs. Kisses her cheek. “So what now?”

“Hmm?”  
  
“Well, I might not be able to stop you, or even know what you’re trying to do, but I can make sure it goes exactly to plan, right? If everything goes perfectly, you’ll stay safe. So, I guess we’re breaking up?”  
  
“Yeah,” Lena says, holding her tighter. “Tomorrow, maybe. In the courtyard. Remember when James and Lucy split there? Everyone was talking about it for weeks.”  
  
Kara groans. “This is going to suck.”  
  
“It really is. But you just have to remember that it isn’t real. That I love you. But Lex has to believe it. You need to look like you hate me.” Lena’s jaw clenches. There are other things, terrible things, that need to be said to her, that Lex needs to know were shouted at her face. But she won’t force Kara do be the one to do it.  
They discuss it a while longer, ironing out the details, the fake whys, how to play it.  
  
“Can we just ignore we have to do this, for an hour?” Lena mumbles. “I want to talk to you. _About_ you. I’ve barely seen you in three weeks. I want to forget about Lex for a second.” Who knows when they’ll be able to again.  
  
So they do. Kara tells her about classes and studying and how Winn and James are doing, how they’re confused but hoping she’s okay. Lena recounts what she knows about Alex and Maggie from their phone calls that have been forgotten in letters.  
  
“I turn on your star machine every night,” Kara adds. “It makes me feel kind of like you’re there.”  
  
Lena wishes she had something like that, innocuous but meaningful that she could take with her when she goes into the belly of the beast.  
  
When she gets to back to her dorm in the early hours of the morning, she tears a familiar page out of her old Herbology book, folding it up and slipping it into her pocket.

///

Their break up is messy, public, and everything Lena needs it to be. It’s also vague, draped in ambiguity, as if everyone overhearing has walked in halfway through a conversation. They amass a strong, eager crowd, having always been that couple people assumed would still be together at the reunions. The whole school is buzzing by the time Lena storms off, her head full of the fact that it’s _working_ , it’s only a matter of time before Lex finds out, and also how ridiculously hot Kara is when she yells.

///

That night, they meet up in the secret passageway behind the mirror on the fourth floor, and admittedly, this time, there’s a lot less talking. While the corridor to Honeydukes it narrow and long, this one is almost cavernous. Lena suspects it was used for meetings once, because there are chairs scattered around, and a large, heavy oak desk at the front of the room.  
  
The second Kara walks in, they’re kissing, finally allowing the simmering tension to boil over, bubbling and burning. The words _we’re over_ that have echoed between them all day are chased into oblivion with teeth and tongues; they were founded on nothing and now they’ve faded back into it.   
  
They never fight but they are _good_ at it, at blazing and exploding and tearing up the world around them, and all Lena has wanted since the courtyard is to have Kara moaning her name instead of angrily shouting it.  
  
Kara’s got one hand buried in her hair and the other tugging her half-undone tie, gasping softly while Lena kisses her, tugging on her bottom lip and letting her own hands wander, taking an inventory of all the clothes in her path: robes, a skirt, a blouse, stockings.  
  
They stumble backwards, until they hit the edge of that ancient desk, and Lena lets Kara push her into it for a moment before flipping their positions, the blonde sliding up to sit on the counter and Lena moving to stand between her legs, fingers leaving marks on thighs as she presses closer, harder into Kara.  
  
Lena’s robes are shoved off her shoulders, and she kicks them from where they pool at her feet to some distant corner of the room, literally unable to care less about where they end up when she’s so focused on tugging off Kara’s, too.  
  
This is probably too fast, she thinks, as her shirt buttons are fumbled open, leaving nothing between her and Kara but her bra and her tie. It’s amazing, incredible, but neither of them has breathed in, like, a minute, and -  
  
Kara does that thing with her tongue that has Lena kissing her neck, sucking on the skin, has her hands ignoring hemlines and skating higher and higher. She traces the top of her girlfriend’s stockings before forcing herself to imagine ice cold water and pull her hands away, not wanting to push Kara, not wanting to rush.  
It doesn’t seem to work, though, because those now-unoccupied hands take it as an opportunity to rid Kara of her shirt, eventually getting impatient and ripping the last few buttons, which is hopefully okay because she’s pretty sure Kara’s never really liked this blouse anyway.  
  
Her fingers trace down abs and she lets one nail go just that little bit farther, dipping a few millimetres below the waistband and dragging down the curve of her hipbone, feeling Kara shiver against her. Lena kisses her hard, and Kara leans back to rest on her elbows, all flushed cheeks and closed eyes.  
   
Then her fingers are threaded through the belt loops of Lena’s jeans, pulling insistently forward, until she gives in, sliding up onto the desk to hover over Kara, pressing into her, so she’s lying against the oak, hands skating up Lena’s sides.  
  
It occurs to Lena that the hardwood can’t be very comfortable, must be unforgiving against her bones, but Kara isn’t protesting, just mumbling inarticulately at that thing Lena’s learned to do with her mouth against her neck.  
  
Lena stopped actually _thinking_ about the time Kara’s lips touched hers, but almost all brain function has gone out the window now in favour of instinct. Her leg slides up between Kara’s and she can’t really stop the way she grinds down when Kara makes a sound like _that._  
  
Kara’s fingers dig hard into her back, nails probably leaving little crescent moons in the skin. Lena’s breathing has completely lost rhythm, and she’s somehow both a bit numb and completely, dangerously aware of every little tensed muscle and heartbeat.  
  
She’s about to ask _do you want to stop_ when Kara’s hips rock up into hers, and the words evaporate into stuttered syllables and a stumbling gasp. Her hands clench into fists on the desk top, but after a moment and Kara’s soft blue gaze, she manages to relax enough to rest most of her weight on one arm, the other hand tripping down to _exactly_ where -    
  
Her phone makes the loud, fiery, roaring noise that means she’s got a call incoming, brutally shattering the soundscape of hushed sighs and stolen moans.  
  
Lena growls, dropping her head to rest against her girlfriend’s collarbone and letting every single expletive she knows run quietly through her mind, not voicing any because Kara hates cursing.  
  
She’s horribly worked up and turned on; her whole body is humming, and she wishes desperately that whatever that call is about could’ve waited an hour.  
  
“I am going to _punch_ Alex,” Kara grumbles, palms still warm against Lena’s hips, the pads of her fingers brushing over the contrast of rough denim across to smooth skin.  
  
Lena laughs; she’s pretty sure Kara’s never said anything that violent in her whole life.  
  
She kisses her girlfriend’s cheek gently before carefully climbing off her, dropping onto the floor and snatching up the phone. She stands up again, leaning back against the desk, and feels Kara push up to sit behind her, arms wrapping around Lena’s waist and her forehead lowering to rest between Lena’s bare shoulder blades. Kara’s slowly steadying breaths are warm against her spine.  
  
Lena covers Kara’s hands with one of her own, the other raising the phone to her ear.  
  
“Hey, Alex.”  
  
“What the hell took you so long to answer?”  
  
“Umm… I was doing homework.”  
  
“Right.”  
  
“It was important.”  
  
“Mmm.”  
  
“Has something happened? Why are you calling?”  
  
Alex pauses. “It’s reached Lex. What happened with you and Kara today. Our double agent just came back asking did I know that my little sister broke up with a Luthor.”  
  
“You can’t tell them the plan. They have to believe it.” Lena can almost _feel_ the way Kara is listening furiously, trying to figure out exactly what they intend to do.  
She dusts her thumb in gentle circles along the inside of Kara’s wrist in understanding.  
  
“I know. Are you okay?”  
  
Lena thinks about how no matter how fake it had been, acting out a break up with Kara had burned her like acid. About how not telling Kara absolutely everything for the first time ever is sickening, and the only thing that stops her explaining what she plans to do is the knowledge that Kara would try to help her, and helping her would get Kara killed. “Yeah. I’m fine.”  
  
“…She’s with you, isn’t she?”  
  
Lena swallows. “Yeah.”  
  
“And you’re not going to tell me anything other than _I’m fine_ as long as she is, right?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
Alex doesn’t fight her on it; even though she loves Lena, Kara is her _baby_ _sister_ , and Lena knows that Alex is just as dead set as she is on keeping the youngest Danvers out of this whole mess. The further from Lex they can get Kara, the better.  
  
“I’ll let you get back to your _homework_ , then.” There’s a teasing lilt to Alex’s voice that is a welcome hint of normality.  
  
Lena clicks _end call_ and turns in Kara’s arms so that they’re face to face. They’re both silent, and she takes the opportunity to let her eyes over Kara, every line and edge and curve. Neither of them have shirts on, Lena’s jeans have been pulled low on her hips and Kara’s skirt is still ridden up past the point of inappropriate, but she does her best to quell the hormones warring in her veins.  
  
“I really, _really_ want you,” Lena sighs out. “But this isn’t how it should be. You deserve for it to be perfect and romantic and slow and all of those things.”  
  
“You do, too,” Kara agrees softly, but neither of them moves to step away, to redress. “But if Alex hadn’t called you just then I don’t think I would’ve stopped.”  
  
Lena grins. “Me neither. You’re pretty hot.”  
  
Kara rolls her eyes, but she’s smirking, too. “Thanks, babe.”  
  
They stay there, holding each other for a while longer, pretending that maybe Lena could walk Kara back to her dorm, that they could sit next to each other in class tomorrow, that outside in the hallways, they aren’t broken up.  
  
“I miss you out there,” Kara pouts a little into the crook of Lena’s neck.  
  
“We’ve been split up for less than six hours,” she notes. “And also, I miss you more.”  
  
It’s stupid and cheesy and _ordinary_ _,_ and Lena clings to it with both hands. She’ll be pushing forward with her plan tomorrow, but it’s easy to drown that knowledge out with Kara in her arms.  
  
Finally, after what feels like hours but also only seconds, Lena pulls back and says, “We have to leave.” Leave here, leave each other, leave this little sanctuary.

///

She needs her Gryffindor for this.  
  
Lena won’t ask Kara to do it and she doesn’t think Winn would be believable, so unfortunately, the weight falls on James’ shoulders. She’s seen him angry before – it’s always the protective kind, like that day in the dungeons with Donovan – but she’s almost sure he could conjure it to play aggressive if he needed to. And she needs him to.  
  
She drags him into the hidden alcove behind the statue of Gregory the Smary and explains what she wants him to do, before apologising at a mile a minute.  
  
“I can’t tell you why. I know this kind of thing isn’t you, James, and I’m _so_ sorry. But someone has to do it. And I trust you, so much. You’ve always had my back, and I need you to have it now. Well, actually, I need you to stab it, but -”  
  
“I’ll do it, Lena,” he agrees, rubbing the back of his neck in discomfort. “But I’ve never really said anything like that to anyone. And, I mean, I can be scary if I want to be, I guess. But I never want to be.”  
  
“That’s why you’re a Gryffindor, James,” she tells him. “You have all that power – your magic, your strength – and you use it to be kind.”

///

They wait a few days, until there’s some new gossip to dilute the debate over Kara and Lena’s breakup. This can’t all happen too fast, or it’ll seem staged, and Lex will realise what’s going on.  
  
While she and Kara fought in a very public arena, she and James fake an attempt at privacy, choosing an empty classroom next to a crowded hallway to have their row, leaving the door open just enough for raised voices to carry, but not so much that it seems they’re inviting spectators.  
  
“God, I should’ve known better!” James shouts, pointing at her angrily. His face is pulled tight with rage but his eyes are still full and calm, the patient eyes of a boy who’s been her brother for the last seven years in all ways but blood. “I don’t know why I expected more from a _Luthor._ Your whole damn family is _evil_ and you’re a coward. They should throw you in Azkaban like Lex!”  
  
She yells right back at him, and they get closer and louder until a professor bursts in to break it up, and Lena only lets him get halfway through his monologue about how disappointing it is to see this kind of behaviour from seniors before stalking out, burning through the corridors and skipping the rest of her classes.

///

Finally, it is Alex’s turn to play her part.  
  
She and a small team of Aurors storm into Hogwarts, and instead of going to get Lena directly, they send a student to collect her from class, citing that they’re here to “question her under suspicion of aiding her brother”. Alex might’ve graduated a few years ago, but she still knows who the real rumour mills are, and is sure to give this errand to one of the biggest gossips in sixth year.  
  
Once Lena’s dragged into a vacated office to be interrogated, half the school is discussing where her real loyalties lie. She wonders if anybody is bothering to question it, to defend her, or if they’re all talking about whole nests of bad eggs and _once a Luthor, always a Luthor._  
  
They have no way of knowing if Lex’s reach extends even to the teacher’s quarters, so they can’t risk talking openly. Alex does squeeze her hand comfortingly when she pats her down, supposedly searching for communication devices. When the eldest Danvers tugs them chest to chest to “threaten” her, Lena takes advantage of the curtain of their robes to slip a piece of paper into Alex’s jeans.  
  
It reads: _I’m going tonight._

///

After the other girls in the dorm fall asleep, Lena pulls the rucksack she packed earlier out from under her bed, and leaves quietly, weaving her way through familiar corridors and down well-trodden staircases.  
  
She’ll miss this place. Doesn’t know if she’ll ever get to come back.  
  
More than anything in the world, she wants to sneak into the Hufflepuff dormitories, to tell Kara a proper goodbye. But she can’t even risk meeting her in one of their secret passageways, now, because after the events of the last couple of days, Lex will be watching her like a hawk. So Kara will wake up tomorrow and Lena will no longer be at Hogwarts, and she might be able to guess, but she won’t know why.  
  
It makes Lena a terrible girlfriend and an awful best friend, but all this isn’t so much a choice as an inevitability.  
  
“I love you,” she whispers out, as if the stone walls of the castle will carry it back to Kara, remind her of it in her sleep. She shoves her hands in her pockets, letting her fingers close around the folded-up textbook page about the Saviour Vine, her talisman to carry with her.  
  
Lena moves like a ghost out of the castle doors, across the grounds, enchanting a small pebble to disable to Whomping Willow. She slithers through the hidden tunnel, eventually arriving at the threshold of the Shrieking Shack. She wonders if it’s ever been haunted, ever held more than just students searching for lost things they will never find.  
  
The second she steps out of the passage, the heartbeat in which the last of Hogwarts’ protective spells release her, her forearm burns again. It’s less sharp, this time, the words carved into the first few layers of skin, rather than all the way down to the bone.  
  
It’s an address. Not a familiar one, but Lex is far too smart to use anywhere predictable.  
  
She Disapparates.

///

When she materialises, she realises that Lex has directed her to a wasteland. It’s the burned out remains of what could’ve once been a village, with the charred shells of houses forming tragic streets. There’s no smoke, no embers. This place has been dead for a long time.  
  
She looks up, and the stars are different, but still tug at her memory somehow. She can’t place them.  
  
“Hello, Lena.” His voice echoes, and she spins to turn and face the only other thing in this place that is still alive. “What are you doing here?”  
  
Lex grins at her, pale in the moonlight, resting casually against a sign that is too blackened by fire to make out anything but the first three letters: K R Y. Suddenly, she starts to add up the recognisable cosmos, the destruction, the sign, with a hundred tiny stories mentioned in passing. 

This is Kara’s wizarding colony, the one utterly wrecked by the last war. He must’ve known that she would work out where they are. It’s a test. He’s checking to see if she still cares, if she’ll flinch in the face of the cemetery of Kara’s childhood.  
  
God, her heart aches with it all.  
  
But – “I’m a Luthor,” she tells him, full of artificial arrogance and a little genuine bitterness, “the real question is why wasn’t I here sooner?”  


**Author's Note:**

> come find me on tumblr @ teamsupercorp  
> anon asks are now on, so feel free to spread the love/hate :P


End file.
